Railfan Technology > What slide scanner would you recommend?

Help, please.
I have a ton of 35mm slides that I would like to scan.
What scanner would Trainorders members recommend?
I would really like one that was sort of automated, that would take a typical box load of 36 slides and scan them automatically...
Maybe that is wishful thinking.
Thanks in advance
Bob Phelps

Nikon used to have on but it is out of production and only available on the used market.

This is a common TO thread so do a search going back more than a year.

Warning, slide scanning is a time consuming process, you might automate part of the process but in the end it is not just hit the scan button and be done.

Posted from iPhone

Last time I checked 'we' were impresed with the Plustek line of 35mm slide scanners, although I never did buy one. I have the impression Plustek has an automated feeder available but it was very pricey. The other option is a flatbed scanner which can scan multiple 35mm slides at a time, but that's far from automated. There is a great deal of info in the TO archives.

I'd be interested to hear if there's something 'newer' than Plustek. Also interesting to think that at some point there will not be very many 35mm slides left to scan, so the market for a specifc slide scanner may become limited.

The HP G4050 Photo Scanner does 16slides at a time and is still in current production with win7 and win8, probably win10, capability.
It has been a workhorse for me and I just bought a 2nd one after 4 years of use to run two at the same time.

If you used low settings (300dpi) you might be able to continually load, do a minimal amount of correction, fire it off and be ready for the next shot of 16 in a matter of minutes.
I use 600dpi (takes about half an hour for 16), occasionally 1200dpi. If it is really worth saving I will re-do it at 2400dpi.... which seems to realistically be the maximum resolution.

 

fbe Wrote:
> Warning, slide scanning is a time consuming
> process, you might automate part of the process
> but in the end it is not just hit the scan button
> and be done.

THAT is an understatement!  While vendor provided and/or purchased scanner software can do a great deal of 'clean up' on the images, there's still a significant amount of time needed to manually perform some cleanup tasks.  Even after carefully brushing each slide, you'll still end up with a lot of 'dust' and perhaps scratches, all showing up as small black spots.  Depending on film brand and how/where the slides were stored, they may be reasonably 'pristine' in the color renditions or entire colors faded and even absent.  Sometimes the slides have a green tint overall, or maybe reddish, or <whatever>.  I recently scanned slides for a family that lived along the ocean in Rhode Island and the high humidity and 50+ years storage resulted in significant amounts of color fading, tints, and worst of all, mold.  Much can be cleaned up manually, but very labor intensive.  Obviously, mold-caused emulsion destruction cannot be 'cloned' to fix portions of someones' face, etc.  Even just 'putting back' small chunks of image via cloning and/or 'heal' operations takes time. 

As far as scanners go, you'll get as many suggestions as there are people responding.  I found the Epson V550 scanner a decent scanner and it handles 4 slides at a time quite easily.  Unfortunately, the one I bought and the one that replaced it were both defective in that the exposure on the #1 slide position was frequently over-exposed and #2 postion sometimes over-exposed as well.  I really liked the software that came with it, but handing large film size slides that fill the slide holder within 1/4" from all 4 borders the Epson software cannot do (at least the version they had this past March).  I ultimately replaced the Epson with a Canon 9000F Mark ii and found it a very capable scanner, but the software it comes with isn't very user friendly, in my opinion.  I replaced that with some purchased scanner software, and I'll get down to 'learning that one' when I get more time and get back to scanning slides.

As far as post processing goes, if you're a digital photographer, you're all set with whatever editing software you have such as Lightroom, Photoshop, etc.  GIMP is available for free and is more than sufficient for slide editing.  One of the advantages of using an editor program is you can correct a number of problems in the slide.  Not just 'dust and scratches' (some software can do that but it loses a little clarity), but correct some over/under exposure of the original slide, correct a not-quite-horizontal image, or even cropping it to remove some distracting elements in the image.  There was a discussion on this forum a couple of months ago about the 'ethics' of doing image correction, such as removing guy wires, etc, both in your own images or in someone elses.  The choice is up to you.  

As far as storing your finished images, determine ahead of time how you are going to catalog them.  If you're like me, I generally kept my slides segregated by railroad, or sometimes similar railroads that I didn't take that many shots of.  I followed the same thinking and created folders for each railroad, and those folders within a 'big' folder aptly titled 'Scanned RR Slides'.  You'll also find the scanned images will take up significant portions of your hard drive(s), so plan accordingly.  Also, consider a backup hard drive (perhaps external) as I've read too many 'my hard drive crashed and everything is lost' stories in a variety of photography forums and PC techie forums I frequent.  Drives fail.  That's a fact of life.  $100 for 'insurance' is cheap when considering the alternative.

As mentioned by many, slide scanning is extremely slow, and if you use ICE software for dust and scratch removal it is very very slow! 
I am not prepared to devote my time to slide scanning, thus, here in the UK, I use a commercial firm to scan, using ICE.
Even then, the post scan manipulation is time consuming, Chris uk.

Has anyone had good luck sending slides off to be scanned for a fee?

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

Bob - I am a contact of yours on flickr ...'delticfan'.  All my uploads of scanned slides in the last few years have been commercially scanned.
ie - all the recent MRL photos from 1995 are commercial scans, as are the old UK stuff,  (done in the UK).  Chris UK.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_davis_photos/

I've been using an Epson v700 now for several years as I'm slowly working through about ~10k slides and medium/large format negatives from a gentleman who passed away a few years back.  I'm also using Vuescan to control it rather than the stock software.  I find it does a better job of scanning and removing dust (the scanner has built-in infrared dust detection), and I can configure it to automate most of the workflow to get decent scans.  They're not as perfect as somebody sitting there tinkering with each frame for 20-30 minutes, but they're close enough that you can fix any slight color balance and exposure issues afterwards and I might get through the whole collection in my lifetime.

Basically the process is load up 12 slides at a time, tell Vuescan to start, come back 45 minutes later, change 'em out, start the whole process over again.  Then every 4-5 batches, I'll go through and rename everything to capture the details about what/where/when.  It's not fast, but the results are quite good.

Keep your slides.  They have value.  Scans are worthless.  Scan a slide when you want to post or publish it.  But never get rid of the originals.

KG

Having done this process with approximately 20,000 slides and another 200 or so rolls of both color and black and white film, I would recommend not doing it.

Time consuming is the phrase I must repeat.  

I have gone to having my local camera shop scan any newly processed film at the time of processing. They have much better equipment than I could ever afford.

I used an ACER Scan Wit 2720S with a Mac. I am still able to use the scanner with VueScan and OS X.10, all these years later.

 

Yes!  Finally someone who share my point of view (I suspect there are many others).  I scan my Kodachromes primarily for pleasure which includes sharing on sites like this one and various Facebook railfan pages.  Sometimes I scan a marginal quality slide and see if I can improve it with Photoshop (I have had some fun with that too).   No way would I ever part with my original Kodachromes. 

kgmontreal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Keep your slides.  They have value.  Scans are
> worthless.  Scan a slide when you want to post or
> publish it.  But never get rid of the originals.
>
> KG

Yes, I agree, keep your slides, they are the original and can never be deleted or lost on a computer such a digital image can be. As someone said, "on a slide you have actually captured the light rays and ambiance of that day, a digital image is just a bunch of digits processed by a microchip. Doug
kgmontreal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Keep your slides.  They have value.  Scans are
> worthless.  Scan a slide when you want to post or
> publish it.  But never get rid of the originals.
>
> KG

kgmontreal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Keep your slides.  They have value.  Scans are
> worthless.  Scan a slide when you want to post or
> publish it.  But never get rid of the originals.
>
> KG

Your slides are worthless if they are not viewed by others interested in them.  Scanning and the Internet gives them value.  Thus the scan is an extremely valuable medium.

Marty Bernard

I have a fast Windows 10 laptop and VueScan runs my Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED just fine.

Marty Bernard