[CloudHound]

Recovered several boxes of slides this weekend which were taken mostly in the 1970s and 80s (part of a collection running into the thousands).

Many feature PFA Rallys at Sywell which I thought would be of interest, this year's being such a good one.

What do people use these days? My inclanation is to buy a single slide scanner plugged into my MAC but I've seen some i-Phone apps and wonder if the are worth considering.

Over to you!

[Pete L]

Not sure if the same applies to slides but the professional photographer I was talking to today said he photographs old photographs rather than use a scanner - presumably the sensors in cameras are a whole lot better than the average budget scanner.

[akg1486]

For printed photos, especially old ones, taking photos of the photos is the smart way to go. I've "rescued" a lot of old photos from the first decades of the last century that my flying club had laying around. Information in slides are packed so much more densely that I doubt a consumer camera would to a good job.

I more or less never buy used stuff, but slide scanners are a good example on kit that people buy and then use once: when all of the family's slides are scanned, there's no more use for them. So I would look at eBay or similar. As an added advantage, anyone selling a scanner online should be able to produce samples of their own scans.

[rjc101]

I looked at this last year, and ended up paying MrScan ( https://www.mr-scan.co.uk/ ) to do them all for me. Plus some old video tapes too.

They clean up the images as part of the service, and the results were excellent. Shipped some more off to them yesterday.

[Genghis the Engineer]

I have a slide and negative scanner, it works, but it's also years old and I'm sure much better kit exists now.

Two big pointers however.

(1) If scanning negatives, suitable software for inverting it

(2) An air blower / can of air / sort of thing. Getting every last spec of dust off the images before scanning them is absolutely paramount.

G

[kanga]

Not sure about 'best' kit, but at start of lockdown we invested in what appeared from online reviews to be an 'adequate' kit: 'DigitNow! F22MP 126KPK'.

Does slides, Super 8 and negatives. I've used it only for slides, so far. Each slide generates a digital image of ~1.86MB, but obviously image editor software programs allow cropping, shrinking and other manipulations.

Disadvantages: each slide requires a number of physical actions, including (as mentioned) clearing the dust, and careful alignment and orientation of the slide in the viewing frame (or edges may be lost, or a mirror image created); but it's quite easy to get into a 'rhythm'. Slides in 'thick' plastic mounts (as opposed to thin cardboard ones), as some of our '60s Ilford ones were, are a bit of a strain on the sliding slide holder, but can be managed.

It has a limited inbuilt memory, and can hold a memory card, but I found it easier to load each image directly into the laptop as part of the physical routine of each slide. This enables it to take its power from the laptop on the same data cable as uploads to the laptop; and allows rapid further transfer of the accumulated images into another Directory (important to do this before unplugging the data cable or some scans will be lost).

Quality of the digital images is obviously no better than that of the originals, and purists might say is inadequate. But they have been fine for my uses so far (incorporating into Zoom presentations to JAM colleagues during lockdown).

[Propwash]

I bought a slide and negative scanner from Lidl a couple of years ago. I had the intention of digitising a considerable number of old negatives and slides, but whilst some of them were worth the effort, too many exposed the poor quality of the original (I never did claim to be a good photographer). In the end I only selected a small sample that were worth the effort. The kit worked well, but it is time-consuming.

I spent time instead digitising more of my old vinyl albums on a different bit of kit and that has proved well worth the trouble.

PW

[Cessna571]

I’ll ask my photographer friend, I know he recently did about a thousand from his old stock.

[Cessna571]

From my photographer friend.

“Epson Perfection V600.
flat bed scanner has a film and slide scanner built in the lid.
Then I retouch them to remove dust and scratches in photoshop (scanner software only goes so far).

Good bit of kit”

[TravellerBob]

If you have a clean highly reflective screen, and a decent projector you'd be better-off taking photos of the reasonably sized projected image from a tripod-mounted camera.

The analogue enlargement of the slide will be significantly better than any digital enlargement of a 35mm slide and the camera will capture this perfectly - as good as any original.

Slides were meant to be viewed as 5 foot across at least and the pixel-density-equiv of proper slide film makes cheap (and expensive) slide scanners look a bit rubbish to be fair.

Don't scan the slide; photograph the projected image. Get the angles right once and you will be amazed.

[CloudHound]

Unfortunately, I don’t have a projector, camera or tripod These slides are in some instances over 50 years old from my plane-spotting childhood.

Mr Scan looks favourite so far.