Need Help choosing 35 mm Slide Scanning Option

[Penguin]

I have several hundred 35mm slides I wish to put into digital format. Most are Kodachrome 25 slides 25 years old with high contrast (Antarctic photos with lots of sunlight and white snow). I wish to generate digital formats primarily to save them and ensure the photos can be handed down to future generations of the family and secondarily to make easily viewed DVD slide shows.

It seems I have several options:

1) Send them out for professional scanning.

2) Buy a lower end slide scanner and do it myself. Sell the scanner when I am finished as it has no future use for me.

3) Buy a general purpose flatbed scanner. Probably not as good of quality as a slide scanner, but a flatbed scanner would have some future usefulness to me.

4) Upgrade my digital camera to a 4 or 5 meg version and use a slide copier adaptor to slowy copy the slides one by one (I've got time since it's Winter and there is no deadline for completing the slides). I understand Nikon has an adaptor for their Coolpix line of cameras. This would perhaps be most economical as the camera would have great future use for me.

The slides will not have any profession use, but obviously I would like to preserve as much of the original quality as makes reasonable sense for non-commercial personal use.

Any advice are warnings as to these options?

Thanks for any help you might provide in choosing a path to go down!

[Trevor Ash]

Woah! I'm in Gurnee too, I just moved back to her from spending about 10 years in California.

Of all the options you mentioned I think option 2 or 3 would be the ones I'd choose. The deciding factor for me between two and three would be dollars vs. how much quality is enough. Since quality is subjective, you'll likely have a hard time figuring out what is "good enough" for you.

Sending them out to be professionally scanned is VERY expensive. Hundreds of slides will cost many thousands.

I can't speak for the digital camera option but based on my experience it sounds like it could be troublesome and not give quality as good as even a flatbed scanner (I don't mind being corrected if I'm wrong about this, it's just a guess)

So here's the deal; for the DVD slide shows, I'm confident a lower quality flatbed scanner with slide attachment will give more than enough quality and detail. But for the "handing of photos for future generations" I'd seriously consider using an actual slide scanner that provides good quality (but doesn't necessarily have to be extremely large) scans.

As for warnings, scanning your own slides (via slide scanner or flated scanner) is going to be an exercise in frustration so prepare yourself ahead of time and don't expect to get "perfect" results without investing some time.

Best of luck!

[Zman]

My advice would be to RENT a 35mm film scanner. After you practice for awile the scanning will not be that bad.

With my CS 4000 I can scan a slide in about 1 minute using the fastest setting. Realistic time is about 1.5 minutes, slide to slide. At that rate you could do 250 slides in about 6 or 7 hours. Not that big of a deal.

A noncompressed slide scanned at 4000 dpi will produce a file of around 67mb so you will need to have hardrive space and then do DVD backups.

I have not had good luck scanning with Kodachrome slide film for some reason. My Provia scans awesomely but the "25" and "64" have had issues. I am sure that it is just me though.

If you can not find anyone to rent you a unit I would try Ebay and pick up a used one for a song.

Z