Professional Slide Scanning

[berrywise]

I don't normally shoot film but I have about a hundred slides that I would like to have scanned. I will mostly be using these for a website and digital slide show. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good company that would be able to handle something like this.

I did find one company by doing a google search that seems to be reasonably priced. They are http://www.larsendigital.biz/ It looks like they will scan by slides at 4000 dpi (is that overkill? would 2000 dpi be enough?) and do some minor touching up, burn to DVD for 85 dollars (2000 dpi) or 135 dollars (4000 dpi)

with that they will (quote):

Infrared dust & scratch reduction (ICE)

Automated Color and Fade Restoration as required

Auto Crop options of 1. Black border, 2. Automated crop to eliminate black border

Image Rotation as required

Minimal manual Post Scan Image adjustments (color - contrast)


Any comments? better places? better solutions?

Thanks!

scott

[another view]

I've seen their website before but have no experience with them. Sounds like a good deal though, ICE will save you a ton of time spotting out dust in Photoshop! The other things they will do are handy too, just a time saver for you. Actually Nikon has a scanner for about $1100 that will automate most (or all) of that and give you 4000 dpi resolution. IOW the technology is pretty cheap if you use it a lot.

A few years ago I had Linhoff do some prints from slides and they were pretty good to deal with. I've since bought a scanner and now I think I get better results than they did, but have no experience with their scanning service. They offer a 4mb file at $1 per slide. This is nothing compared to what you've already found - they don't talk about ICE or anything else, and that file size won't give you a very big print.

I'd probably try Larsen and go with the highest resolution so you don't have to do it again. If these are valuable slides, I might send them a few at first just to see how they work before I'd trust them with all of them at once.

[GB1]

Sounds like a decent price for all the extras they're throwing in.

ICE scanners are expensive, but note that you can get your own 35mm scanner (negs and slides) w/o ICE for ~ $250-$300 nowadays, with a max res of I think 2400 dpi. Might come in handy to own one if you want to scan negs in the future. But the price they're quoting u seems reasonable too, considering all the work and exp. equipment they'll use.

[berrywise]

Thanks guys for the responses. They offer a free sample so I think I will send them in that to see what that looks like. They will post a 2000 dpi scan of that slide to their webpage for download and viewing so that should be able to tell me if a 2000 dpi scan is all I will need.

I think the biggest thing that I would like to avoid is sitting in front of my computer scanning that many slides. I'm sure they have a bulk loader which makes it much easier for them.

Thanks again, I'll let you know how it turns out.

Thanks,
Scott