35mm Slides to Digital Files

I have 1000s of 35mm slides and film negatives. Where is the best place to have these digitized. What is your experience with this process.

Rohn,

I don't have any lab recommendations, but the big question is how much time and money are you will to invest? You can have 35mm slides scanned relative cheaply, but the file sizes will be quite small and probably only good enough for web display. The prices jumps considerably when you want to have scanned files large enough for good prints.

An alternative would be to buy your own dedicated film scanner which can be had for less than $500. You can scan to your heart's desire. But here is where TIME will get you. Most dedicated film scanners are pretty slow, especially when you're sitting there watching.... and can only do one at a time (most have film holders that hold multiple slides, but still only one scan at a time.)

I too have thousands of 35mm slides (over 15,000.) I bought a Minolta DIimage II dedicated 35mm scanner and like it very much. The Nikon Coolscans are quite popular as well. In the end, I've only scanned images that I either needed to print or wanted for web use and I have no desire to scan thousands of slides.

Lon

Rohn, I second Lon's advice at the end. Rather than scanning the whole library, I scanned only those slides that I wanted to use, and I can dip into the library any time to scan more, as we have a large drum scanner we use for our photo business. You can do the same with one of the smaller dedicated film/slide scanners Lon mentioned.

I've been going through the same process myself. I bought an Epson V500 and it has worked great. Of course as metioned above it only scans 4 slides one at a time.

It has ice technology and it cleans up dust etc as it scans. Last year and this year during the winter I have been scanning my "keepers". It will keep me busy for several years.
The great thing is you can scan them into Photoshop and tweak them. I then place them on a couple of Seagate 500gb drives.

You dont mention what you want to use them for. If you just want to use them for programs and slideshows (or web display) then just put them on a lightbox and photograph them. Honestly. My husband had ton of (Kodachrome) slides from his trip to Africa and wanted to put on an African Safari program. We have a slide scanner but as people mentioned it is SLOW. So one night I tried photographing them. I used my Benbo tripod and set up up so that the camera was parallel to the light box and shot away. I shot RAW using the cloudy settings and the images actually looked better than the originals because they looked warmer. Then I cropped them and we used them toc reate his slideshow. The colors and resolution were excellent. I did not try to print from those files, but they displayed wonderfully.

About 2 years ago, I scanned all my 35mm slides. I didn't have thousands, as you do, but probably a little less than 2,000. I bought a Nikon Coolscan V, and scanned in every slide. As mentioned above, it takes a LOOOOONG time. I think the next model higher has a feeder, but the Coolscan V does not. I sat next to the computer for a couple hours every night scanning slides. Sometimes I would read a book, pausing every minute or so to switch slides, or save a file. Sometimes I would set up my laptop nearby and watch DVDs to pass the time. (I thoroughly enjoyed my time scanning slides and watching all of "Band of Brothers").

Now, I'm basically done, and the scanner hasn't been used in a while. Every once in a while, I use it for scanning some old negatives of family snapshots or something. I think I'm actually going to pack it up and ship it to my dad, so he can scan all of his slides from back in the 60s and 70s.

Anyway, I really think I got my money's worth, and the results are much better than I would have gotten by sending them out to be scanned by someone else.

One thing I would not recommend for 35 mm, unless your goal is simply to get a digital copy of the slide, is a flatbed. They do well for some things, but in making good sized enlargements (greater than 4x prints) or for commercial reproduction/stock, you will run into problems. The biggest one is sharpness. Forget the resolution claims - you will still need that resolution pixels to be sharp and it won't be.

I'll use my flatbed for 4x5 slides, and then shrink the resulting files down to a maximum of 16"x20". That works well. Bigger and I begin to noticeably lose sharpness.

I am using the Nikon Coolscan 4000, which is an older model. Slow, yes. But good enough for 11x14's and my stock requirements. There is an additional multislide feeder available which I have not used, mainly because of everything in my slide files, I've scanned most of what I what to scan.

Drum scans would be an improvement, but probably not a good tradeoff vs cost and not having a final end use in mind.

I'd really recommend going the dedicated slide scanner route if you can and are in no immediate hurry.

Rohn,

I have not tried these folks yet ( I have a package ready to send to them to try their services), but we had a meeting recently about them getting involved with my workshops. If they can deliver good results for what they are asking price wise it may be a good deal.
Anyhow its ScanCafe in Burlingame, Ca. www.scancafe.com.

JG

Rohn,
I have a Nikon LS 4000 dedicated film scanner that I'm not using, I've gone to digital or large format 4x5 capture. It's a good unit, I've scanned all of my 35mm transparencies with this scanner with good results.
This isn't the latest or greatest technology but I can sell it for a very reasonable price to do what you are interested in.

Rob