digitalizing slides en masse?? buy, rent or build?

[Douglas_of_Sweden]

Though I used to shoot mainly black and white I have somewhere on the order of 10,000 colorslides in Kodak carousel slide magazines and an old style Kodak carousel projector. The projecter does not get much use these days, though it still works. I've scanned some of my favourite slides and some familly pictures, but with a work flow where I have to put five slides at the time in the scanner and then scan them one buy one it would take forever. If I try to get my obsolete slides into digital this way most likely computers, scanners and digital pictures will be obsolete before I'm done

I know there is some sort of slide scanner that takes different types of slide magazines and scan them automatically (reflecta digitdia 5000 or Braun 4000, of which the later appears to take Kodak carousel magazines somehow), but I would prefere not to buy one since it would not be of much use once I'm done with my old slides (and should I take a slide film again I can manage with my normal "five at the time"-negative scanner). I'm trying to figure out if I can rent it. I know these scanners will not give top quality, but for web applications, power point presentations in my profesional work (as a researcher) and to get all familly shots in a digital format that can be more easilly shared, it will probably do, and if I ever need higher quality of some pictures I alwas have the original slide and the possibilty to scan it again at higher resolution.

First I want to ask if there is anyone here who has experience of these scanners (or similar ones)? Especially if you have scanned your whole dia records or a large part of it. Was it worth doing? How time consuming was it? How large was the success rate (meaning were there pictures that got so bad that you had to do it again, and to what percentage)?

I'm also wondering how many of you that share the same basic problem: having loads of old slides (or negatives for that matter) that you just don't have as fun with (if you are an amateur) or get the income from (if you are a pro) as you could if you just could get it all transfered to digital? What have your solution been? Scan them one buy one as you need them? But there are tons of shots that my kids never get to see because I'm to lazy to bring out the slide projector, and for that matter it is beginning to feel like a very ancient and anachronistic act...almost like sitting around the radio and playing cards with the whole familly

Then finally, when looking around on the web, I found this amazing web page of an amazing project! This guy (Carl Hutzler) and his dad took a Kodak carousel projector, a Nikon D200, a decent macro 105mm lens and with some other bits and pieces they built their own diascanner! Amazing!
Doesn't look like it would be impossible to repeat...

[tvfd911]

To bring up an old post-

Douglas,

How did you come out on this? I'm in a bit of a position with my grandma's slides. I'm guessing she has at least 30 carousels of slides in the closet that I'd like to digitize. I used a bellows/slide copy rig to get a few to print off after the local photo labs quoted a crazy price for their scanning services.

The DIY link you provided should be a good read. I was already thinking about picking up a "junker" projector from ebay and attempting to rig a camera to it since I don't want to ruin grandma's good projector.

Anyone else do such a project?

[Wheatfield]

A slide projector might be awfully bright for this, but an old enlarger would be an ideal solution, especially if it had a colour head for fine tuning the colour of faded slides.
I'm in the same boat, I have several thousand slides to go through, probably a thousand I would like to bring into digital, and no really convenient way of doing it.
At some point I will cobble something together from my parts bin and make a slide copier that works.
As an aside, it isn't easy to use a conventional slide duplicator/bellows for duplicating slides onto digital because of the small sensor and the amount of extension required. The best I was able to come up with was a close up lens on the 77mm lens in conjunction with a bellows and duplicator.
The slide really needs to be farther away than the rails will allow.

[tvfd911]

Yeah, I ran into a pretty severe crop with it, but fortunately I was able to capture the people I was after in the particular shots.

I realized I have more against me. The slides are in the Sawyer/GAF type carriers, so projector pickings are slim. As far as the light brightness, that bright $30 dollar projector bulb was gong to be one of the first things out and replace it with smaller light source and diffuser of sorts.

I'll look into the enlarger as well, but I know nothing about darkroom equipment. This seems like a good winter project

[rormeister]

I've had a Nikon (shhhhhh) CoolScan IV ED scanner for a few years (still grinding through the hundreds/hundreds of 70's and 80's slides. It's a single slide at a time process, but when the scans run 3 minutes a copy you can work on cleaning up the previous scans. Outcomes are quite good, 2900 dpi TIFF (35mb each), uses Digital Ice and can be preset for some color/brightness/ crop adjustments. It's an older unit, but worth a look:

[HGMonaro]

If you're willing to send them to India, I think there's slide scanning services that work out 'cheap'. Can't remember where I saw it though.

[Douglas_of_Sweden]

Wow, it sure took some time to get some response on this post But better late than never.

I havent found out yet a solution that is fast enough. Have made some experiments with my Kodak carousel projector - projecor lens + DFA100/2.8 macro + K20D. It is very bright, but rather than changes the bulb I was thinking of getting a set of grey filters.

[jeffkrol]

this:
Nikon | SF-210 Auto Slide Feeder | 9240 | B&H Photo Video
and this:
Nikon | Super Coolscan 5000 ED Film Scanner | 9238 | B&H Photo
approx $1649 or so,,,,,
Half price (half resolution?)
http://www.google.com/products/catal...wAw#ps-sellers
opps, same as the reflecta I guess.... which seems to be the same as the braun. since they are all based on a slide projector chassis I'm going to assume they can all take linear or carousel type slide trays.......

[Lowell Goudge]

I bought my own scanner , a minolta dimage II in about 2000.
I played a little with it for a year or so, and then I got serious.
I took all my slides and loaded them up (the carrier holds 4 slides or 6 negatives)
I did a preview scan of each and made rough exposure adjustments in all of them, and scanned them.

I then did the same with all my negatives.

4500 slides, 15000 negatives and 3 1/2 years later I was done.

I accept that the Dimage II was a slow scanner, and a newer scanner shoudl be faster, but to do 20,000 slides or negatives is a big job, no matter how you divide it up.

WHat's the advantage of doing it yourself?

I had control of the file names. I named them based on the slide books they are stored in, or for negatives the strip number from the processing lab.

As I still had all the processing envelopes, I knew the processing dates for all the negatives, and the slides were printed on the slide frame.

This made it easy to sort by date all my shots back over a 20 year span.

With that, and a little thinking about dates for specific events, I now have all my images by date and event.

my concern about sending them to an outsourced lab is how are the images named and sorted? if you send out as many images as I scanned myself, yoou could be in for a surprise when you get a set of cd's or dvds back with every file in one big directory.

I think if you send them out, you need to have some discussions first about orginization of the files. Better before than after.

ps. Douglas of Sweeden, I think there was a good quote from napoleon, who wanted trees planted on the side of the road so his men could always walk in the shade. WHen an aid commented it would take years to grow, he responded, "well then I guess you should get started as soon as possible". The fact is it will take time, but when you consider loading 4-5 images and taking 2-3 minutes each to scan, it only takes a few seconds to launch thenext scan and in the interim you go back to work on something else on a different computer.

[chedoy]

I've tried it several different ways. Ranked by my "IQ" rating.

1) Canoscan 2710 with a constantly crashing SCSI interface into a Win98 PC. Ran off 2300 slides at about a minute per scan. Most of them about 1800 pixels wide. Probably the best method. Wish I still had it. Took me three months to do 2300 slides.

2) Plustek 7200. USB scanner. $175. Supplied Silverfast SE software not too good for white balance/exposure. Most everything has to go thru Photoshop color cast removal. Did another 1500 slides/negatives. Most at 3000 pixels wide. About a minute per slide before PP. About the same as the Epson, worse if you figure the color issues.

3) Epson V500 flatbed. $150. 3-4 minute scans. Less color/WB issues. Comes with templates for 35mm. I had to guestimate a cardboard one for a few 120 slides and negatives I have.

4) DSLR with 70mm FOV lens on extension tubes. Also fooled around with a bellows and some M43 primes on my K100D.

5) Nikon CP950 @2MP digicam in macro mode. Simplest but a pain to refocus every shot.

If you build your own off a camera, a stable rig is nice so focus doesn't have to change. I found a slide holder on ebay for $15 and mounted it a bracket attached to the tripod socket. It came with a rail that gives me slide-to-lens adjustment, but I had to bend metal accurately to get the fixed vertical height. Also, the front has a bellows which comes out to cover the end of the lens Need to play around with the tubes and lenses for coverage yet. I suppose clothespins nailed to a board could work as a slide holder too.

If quality matters, get a more expensive scanner. Otherwise, the Epson, while slow, will do a reasonable job for snapshot type slides, as will your camera. And the camera rig, of course, is fast.

What I found, aside from the fact that my thousands of slides are tech junk, was an accumuation of dust that would require removal of the slide and washing in Edwal film cleaner. Didn't want to do that. There is digital ICE in the scanners, but it really increases the scan time.