... one of the commenters said she got excellent results just projecting her slides onto matte white posterboard and then photographing them with a decent digital camera in manual mode. Anyone try this? I have a ton of Kodachrome slides.I have scanned over 15,000 Kodachrome slides with my Nikon 4000 scanner. I have the slide feeder attachment, but even with this, it takes 2+ minutes per slide (that's 500 hours of work, for those who want to do the math -- almost 13 work weeks). In addition, the little LEDs in that scanner can't really provide enough light to get through the super-dense Kodachrome emulsion, so you often end up with very noisy shadows. Finally, it is very difficult to get the color correct because of the unusual way in which color is "stored" in the Kodachrome emulsion.

By comparison, using a digital camera to capture the output of a slide projector is lightening quick (a few seconds per slide) and you always get great shadows. The downside is that, because of the film curvature you get when film is mounted in a cardboard slide, the edges of the photo are sometimes out of focus. The normal Kodak Carousel lens is designed to compensate somewhat for this, but the optics are not the greatest. I replaced the lens with one by Navitar, and it is infinitely sharper, but it does not have the curvature correction. A slide scanner gives you sharp results, edge-to-edge.

If you have only a few hundred slides, then use a good slide scanner, and purchase Vuescan from Ed Hammrick, and use this instead of the NikonScan software that comes with the scanner. However, if you have thousands of slides, I'd recommend that you consider using the slide projector/digital camera combination. It took me almost two years to get through my dad's 10,000 slide collection. A good friend had a similar-sized collection from his dad, and he got through it in under 24 hours, using the projector & camera.

You can always go back and scan, using a proper slide scanner, the few slides which are really important. If it had to do it all over again, that's what I'd do: capture them all from the projector, and then go back and re-do a few hundred with the slide scanner.

.... but at least with the 'magazine' you can set it off on it's merry way and come back later with 50 slides nicely (hopefully) scanned. Do have to go back a manually re-do ones with tricky lighting or extreme contrast though, if they warrant it ....

geoff

"You might want to consider getting a really good Nikon scanner, used, on eBay."

I spent about 6 months searching ebay and found a few dozen of these available, but every one of them used a SCSI-2 connection. The cheapest SCSI-2 external port card i could find for my motherboard was about $850. So while i found some of the scanners going for as cheap as $500, i couldn't justify spending $1350 to get it running.

Thanks musicvid10. Fortunately I have a large bottle of pure isopropyl alcohol at the office and am sure that I can spare her a few ounces :-)

Mike

Here's a special that was just posted today:
$15 for 220 scans @ 3000 dpi

http://www.scancafe.com/lyve/

Jeepers - I have used 5 or 6 SCSI interfae and never paid anything like that. ` $80 fo rthe last ones.


geoff

The SCSI scanners are really, really old. Probably from the mid 1990s. I bought mine (Nikon 4000) on February 14, 2003, and it is Firewire.

I just checked and there are a LOT of scanners on eBay:

Nikon Scanner eBay Search

At the time I posted, this search returned over 170 listings. A large number of these are NOT SCSI.

I just came across this article on scanning slides that some might find of interest.:

http://www.scantips.com/es-1.html

I have a box full of SCSI external/internal Hardrives, CD roms, cables, terminations, Adaptec 2940 UW cards if anybody is interested.
JJK

What card plugin standard(s) do the cards use? Modern motherboards may not suit, or a suitable driver may not exist for later versions of Windows.