Railfan Technology > Slide and Film questions

These may be stupid questions, but hey - I'll ask them anyway!
I started out with a cheap 35mm camera when I was a kid and shot a few trains, but most of my life I've been shooting digital. So, I have some negative strips still hanging around and am wondering what the best way is to get them converted. A checked out a service and they charge .54 cents to 89 cents per negative depending on the quality you want. I see scanners for sale on ebay, but I really don;t have a ton to do. So is a service my best bet?

Second question: I've bought some 35mm slides of trains with the idea to make enlarged prints from them. I notice there's a LOT of slides for sale on ebay and just wondered: what do you guys do with your slides? Is it just collecting for the fun of collecting them? Do you view them with a projector or have them digitized? Some of the better SP related slides go for 20+$ each, so I just wondered why people collect them....

Thanks in advance!

To answer your question on what to do with the negatives. If you don't have a lot of them you want to have reprinted sending them off would be the way to go. Or you can get a decent scanner and scan them yourself.

As for the slides I have a decent collection. I mainly collect stuff that is from my area, but I do have some that just sparked my modeling interest.

Hope that helps a little
Ben

Posted from Android

$20 is pretty cheap as far as A-grade slides go. Don't be surprised to see them bid well into the three-digit range for certain topics.

I would send off a few negs for printing and see what results are like. If they were developed by a non-photographic studio, they may have suffered from poor manual handling and hence need a fair bit of renovation. After that, you can decide which way to go. chris uk

Thanks for the replies! I'm getting a slide book archive for my slides and I mostly buy SP slides because that's what I model. I just wondered why others buy slides.

Essentially for the same reason we go out and shoot slides (or digital images) in the first place. I buy a lot of slides that were taken before I was out shooting, especially slides from my hometown taken in the 1950's and 60s. It's a fun look back into the past.



Matt_Gidley Wrote:
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> I just wondered why others buy slides.