Good quality scanner for the money. Does a good job on slides. You lay 4 slides at a time on a plastic template that lays on the scanner bed. Not the fastest. Make sure you have some fingernail on your index finger. It will help lift the slides off the template. :-)

The only bad thing is that the Silverfast software lengthens (delays about 15 seconds) the auto turnoff of your computer, not a big deal though if your retired and have a lot of time.
JJK

I have a HP4890, now replaced by a G4050. I can do 16 slides at a time as can the new one. It has a frame where you load the slides. The scanner scans them one at a time and saves each one as a separate file. At 300dpi, scan time is about 10 seconds per slide. Photos can be loaded in any order to fill the bed. Scanner scan them individually and saves each of them in a separate file.

I've done at least 50,000 slides and thousands of photos and it never flinched.

Cost of the new version on the HP site is $199.00 They have one that only has a 4 slide frame for $139.00. You could probably find both of these cheaper on the street.

Lynn

Thanks all -- still undecided but leaning toward the Epson 500V .... Reading through all the reviews .. Anyone ever tried "Shotcopy"? It's a mini little camera stand to shoot slides using your own camera. Has the advantage of speed -- but not sure about quality.

Are you a professional or an amateur? I ask because you likely won't be happy with the V500, and might consider stepping up to the V750. That's what I bought. I am an-ex professional, and you can't scrimp if you really want the quality. But be warned, you can't really get the total quality you might hope for in scanning slides. You'll get close, but I've not yet gotten something that I can say can withstand blowing up as large as a typical Kodak Chrome can.

If you are an amateur, then sure, you'll likely appreciate the V500. If not, save your money and get the right tool for the job.

I have the Epson V700 scanner and its primary use it batch processing slides. I have been very happy with it. If you have thousands of slides to do, you will in due process the larger capacity of 12 vs. 4 slides at a time.

I'm not familiar with the suggested HP at 16 slides, but that would be of value.

Chad

>> Are you a professional or an amateur?

In this case, an amateur. I'm retired. No client to worry about. As I said, my funds are limited. I have thousands of slides to do (all personal) .. I'm doing a web site for my old Army unit. Our mission was photography in Vietnam. 221st Signal Company Vietnam

Some of the scans would be for used on the web site .. the rest are personal to my family.

Love to move up the V700 or 750 Epson Alf -- but --. would someone volunteer to scan a few test slides for me (like 12 maybe) .. I'd send return envelope, blank cd and postage just to see what I might expect out of a V500 -- V700 or V750 -- or HP or what ever?

Any volunteers?

If any of your slides are Kodachrome be aware they can be a beach to scan. I have the Nikon 4000 ED with automated feeder and Vuescan. It took a lot of manual intervention scanning 400 Kodachrome slides and a BIG thank you to John Meyer for his help with this.
I bought the 4000 a couple of years back to scan 5,000 slide for a client and for that task it was money well spent. I believe the 4000 is now obsolete so you'd need to buy the 5000 but both the 4000 and 5000 are not cheap, even second hand.

You might do better sending the slides to a pro lab. Just make certain they really are pro, no shortage of dodgy operators and you get what you pay for.

The problem with Kodachrome is it is very dense, you can need to push a serious amount of light through it. It is also opaque to IR so Nikons ICE technology will only partially work. Be careful with Silverfast, it is expensive and limited to one scanner type per license. Vuescan seems to work just as well without the hubris and cost.

At the end of the day you can do pretty well with an old slide projector, a piece of white paper and a camera. Don't laugh, it wasn't until I tried this with some dense Kodachrome slides that I realised how much image there was waiting to be found in the slides.

Bob.

Bob - I'm sure many of my slides are Kodachrome (ahhhh Kodachrome!) -- thanks for all the input -- still toying with my camera, shooting the slides directly with light behind the slide. I think that works better than what my old Powerlook II scanner can do at 600 dpi. My camera will do about 3400 x 2400 so I can get an 8 x 10 size out of it at around 300 dpi much more than I need for use on the website or for use in a Vegas project. It's actually fairly fast too, even though you are only doing one slide at a time. Still love to compare that result with a scanner I can afford, like the V500 Epson.
- Paul

Usually you will have to pop the scanned slide into your graphics program to remove dirt (at 200 magnification), decay volcanoes, red eye, facial zits, shutter spots, scratches, contrast, gamma, center burn (with Virtual Dub), brightness, croping, smudging out undesirable areas, and smoothing out noisy sky areas. Sometimes 1/2 hour per picture if you want it to look good.
JJK

xberk,
While all the comments being offered are valid, you will probably find that the lower end scanners will do a very satisfactory job for you. Some method of dust reduction is essential. No matter how well the slides have been stored, they will have attracted dust.

Even the Kodachromes can benefit from the application of Digital ICE. What I really approach with trepedation are Ektachromes as they are highly prone to red shift.

I use the Epson 4870 Photo which is a predecessor to the V700. It has performed satisfactorily for me and my clients. However, none of them are professional photographers.

RalphM

I would go for the Canon CanoScan 9000F. Some in depth reviews of different scanners are here:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SCAN1.HTM

Jøran

I have scanned close to 20,000 slides with my Nikon Coolscan 4000, including over 10,000 from my parents' estates five years ago.

It took me over two years to scan those 10,000 slides. At one minute twenty seconds per slide (I bought the batch slide scanner, for $400, for the Nikon scanner, or it would have been much more) you can do the math: almost two months of 40-hour weeks of scanning -- more if you count all the handling and setup time.

If I had to do it all over again, I would NOT use a slide scanner.

Instead, I would simply use a digital camera to photograph the image from a slide projector. Use a telephoto lens on the slide projector, preferably a good lens like a Navitar. Replace the bulb with a low wattage (20-watt) bulb. Point the camera, at close range, directly at the lens. You should be able to intercept the image before it reverses (i.e., it will be upside down). Orient all your slides so they are all horizontal. Once you have this set up, it should take 2-3 seconds per slide. In other words, twenty times faster. It will take a one month project, which I guarantee will take much longer than one month, and condense it down to one long day. The results will be far better than you need for any video project. The dust and dirt will not be as apparent as what you get with the LED-illuminated optical path of a slide scanner, and you will only see the really big stuff. Kodacrhome slides will not be a problem (Bob is correct about the difficulty of scanning Kodachrome with slide scanners).

If you can't use a telephoto lens, then project onto a rear screen. If you can't do that, then project onto a smooth white surface, and try to get the camera located as close behind the projector as possible.

If you need a higher quality (slightly more detail) scan that you get with the slide scanner for certain slides, pull those slides out after you photograph them from the projector and scan them separately.

John -- I'm glad you posted on this topic. Hearing it from you makes a difference to me. I'm still likely to buy a flatbed scanner as mine is over the hill. But from my brief experiments with doing what I call an "optical transfer" (using a camera to shoot the slide), I was thinking exactly as you said " The results will be far better than you need for any video project." -- If I was making tons of 8 x 10 prints or larger, I'd have pause and likely want to send the slides out for scanning as Bob suggested or invest in a V750 or some like that. But considering the ease and speed of doing it with a camera --- I'm probably going to do it that way regardless of the scanner purchase. I'll try the methods you suggested vs shooting the back lit slide directly.

I have not tried projecting directly into the camera lens. I'm using a Carousel Medalist II which has a 300w bulb. FHS 300w 82V .... the lens is a Schneider zoom 70-120mm ... Can't find a bulb replacement at 20 watts. Seems awfully low.

All good stuff guys! .. Really helping me out here....I'm researching all the scanners suggested above...

The problem with slide scanners (esp. those with CID sensors) is that the slides are never fully flat in their mounts (except glass mounts, which come with their own set of issues). Even scanners with CCD sensors can show distortion at the edges and esp. corners. The other drawback (as any lab pro knows) is that the mounts crop the image area slightly, and older cardboard mounts show hairs and mottley edges when scanned in their mounts.

I remove my slides from the mount, flatten them on the bed with a piece of photographic diffusion glass (available from Kodak), and clean and scan them individually. I also scan "most" of them full range and adjust the levels and gamma individually in PS. The ones I had to cut from their cardboard mounts with a razor blade are replaced in plastic mounts.

Having tens of thousands of slides, I look at archiving the best and leaving the rest. My approach is not suggested for mass production, unless you are both young and retired. With my father's excellent work with 1st gen Kodachromes (it helps to know your curves here!), and my sister's work in the wilds of N. Canada and Africa, I've got plenty to keep me busy. BTW, some of their work makes my two decades of professional work look insipid.

As for a scanner, I use an older model with a 4x5" transmission lid, and the diffusion glass mentioned. Native resolution is nothing to brag about, but it makes stunning 8x10's.

HINT: This "old dog" trick comes from over half a century ago --> if you want the sharpest grain pattern possible in your scans, place the slides / negatives emulsion side down on the bed, and flip them later in Photoshop. That way the scanner doesn't have to look through the film base to "see" the image. Oh, and never use your mouth to blow on a slide . . .

>>I remove my slides from the mount, flatten them on the bed
This make sense to me. I've always felt leaving them in the frames would cause a slight shift in focus. Emulsion side down sounds like good advice too.

I'll try that on my old 600 dpi scanner. My old scanner doesn't really do too badly as it's depth range ( if I have that metric right) is 3.3 .. whereas the Epson V500 is 3.4 and the V750 Epson is 4.0 .. Apparently depth or Dmax counts big time as it's the dynamic range --- Still .. there is the issue of time. I'm retired -- but not young!

CCD scanners (like the one you are considering) have good DOF, so the problem is more distortion from film curl. I'm a bit of a purist, having duped gazillions of transparencies back in the day. Find a piece of photo grade opal glass if you can.

Much to my amazement when my recent project was all done and dusted I would say the most problematic slides looked better scanned than projected. Resolution wasn't the issue, the camera they were taken with seems to have had fairly cheap optics, rather it was what was pulled out of the shadows using two pass HDR.

You do have to be careful, I did find Kodachrome has some color shifts in the deep blacks.

Not too certain about your assessment of time taken using a projector compared to a robotic scanner. Certainly time from start to finish could be longer however while the scanner does its thing one can be off doing something else. I'd typically push a few of batches of slides through the scanner per day with no impact on my other work.

Bob.

I found various sizes of real Kodak Opal Glass at SurplusShed.com starting at $3.

I'll give a vote of confidence for the Epsons. For what you're doing, they sound like a good match, quality-wise. The time required is another subject.

For those slides that require the highest quality scan, have a lab do drum scans for you. You can pick up a consumer scanner at Best Buy and try it out -- they have a very liberal return policy.

xberk, Way back in the dark ages when I first did slides, I found a single slide viewer at a flea market in a bunch of other junk. This was a good one with a good glass lens and used 2 aa batteries for the light source.. I made up a jig so I could mount the viewer and my PD150 camera. I'd drop in a slide, push the button on the camera, and go to next slide. Photos were recorder to the card and would hold several hundred slides. When it got full, I'd download them to the computer and start shooting on a new card. It took a few seconds per slide. Don't remember the resolution of the shots, but they weren't bad. Focus and framing were good. I'm sure with todays cameras, thing would look better. Might give you some ideas for set up. One job I did like this was around 4000 slide and I shot them all in two long days.

Lynn

Apologies if this was already mentioned, but the V500 was replaced by the V600 nearly a year ago. I have the V500 for what it's worth. It does what I need.

Rich