OT: Scanning 2" x 2" slides

[RustyCrampon]

I have a couple of hundred old colour 2" x 2" photographic slides that I want to digitise. Can anyone recommend a USB scanner of some kind costing less than £100, that delivers reasonable quality ?

[John Rumm]

You will probably need to look at flat bed units with a transparency adaptor for transparencies of that size.

I have not looked at recent models, but I expect you will need to pay a bit more for decent quality. A second hand Epson 1680 Pro would be a good choice, they are pretty good on transparency scanning with a good dynamic range and colour depth.

[John Williamson]

2" x 2" is the standard size for mounted 35mm slides.

If they're 2 1/4" square, as from a 120 rollfilm camera, then you will need specialist equipment.

Maplin sell a standalone scanner (Currently for about £70) which will convert the slides to JPEGs at 5 megapixel resolution and store the files on an SD card. It will also scan negatives and black and white. I've just digitised all my old negatives and slides in less than a day using the previous, 3 megapixel version, and they're acceptable.

For £109.99, they sell one which does the same at 9 megapixels, which will probably get all the detail off slides taken with a cheap compact camera.

If you're looking at them on a TV screen or monitor, the resolution is more than good enough for that, if you want to edit the slides by cropping, or print them larger than 15 x 10 cm then you will need something better, AKA expensive.

If you've got a DSLR, you can buy slide copiers which fit a standard lens filter mount, some of which will let you zoom into the slide, from about £25 on eBay.

[John Rumm]

Yes true... I was assuming that was the transparency size rather than the mount.

If they are 35mm, then there are loads of options....

There is a large format Nikon cool scan that will handle them as well, but that model is still silly money!

The big problem I find with transparency scanning is not so much resolution as getting decent shadow detail and dynamic range.

Or in some cases even projecting and then rephotographing can get reasonable results if you can avoid the projector hot spot.

[PeterC]

I was told that cheap flat-bed scanners are a waste of time. The suggestions, expensive, are here:

[John Rumm]

Indeed they are - hence why I was recommending one that was about £800 when bought new ;-) (although they can be hard to find in the "pro" version which is basically a 1680 bundled with the transparency hood).

(having used one, and compared it to the results from a Nikon LS2000 dedicated film scanner, I can confirm that its reasonably decent)

[The Natural Philosopher]

thers a canon somewhere at sane money that looks on spec..

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

That's the line trotted out by those who either don't know a fecking thing or just trying to show off. The last few series of Epson (and others) scanners are bloody good. Ok, they don't get quite the detail out that a dedicated slide/neg scanner does, but for the vast majority of the users, the vast majority of the time, they provide good quality results.

[JohnW]

I can recommend the Epson V500 which is available for around =A3125. It only scans 4 x 35mm slides at a time or 1 medium format but a lot of time is taken getting slides clean and "spotting out" dust anyway. Quality is excellent on the 6000+ colour slides and B&W negs I have put through it.

John

[Davey]

I made my own cardboard slide-holding box, and use a sheet of translucent white perspex held in the window frame as the background, and daylight as the light source. So far, I have digitised about 600 slides this way. Cost? Minimal, but took some time experimenting to get it to work properly. Now it's easy, each slide is just put into place, photo taken, slide replaced with next one. There's a little cropping done in the PC, to suit each slide, quick and easy with GIMP. I didn't want to pay the silly money that I saw being asked for by some of the manufacturers, and the Ion products looked horrible.

--=20 Davey.

[Davey]

A quick scan of e-bay shows them to be more like =C2=A3180-200, and that includes the special 'flatbread' version!

--=20 Davey.

[David WE Roberts]

If you are feeling adventurous, you could look on eBay for old SCSI semi-professional scanners. The NGs to look at are, for instance, comp.periphs.scanners.

I helped a friend set up a Heidelberg Linoscan 1400 Scanner she bought for very little money on eBay. Adaptec cards are still readily available and Vuescan do an application including drivers which will handle almost anything. Alternatively, Linux and SANE can also handle virtually anything.

Not as simple as USB, and I don't have any comparisons between very modern USB scanners and these older Linoscans, but it is working well and seems to be built like a tank.

HTH

Dave R

[Steve Firth]

What he said.

I've got one of the Epson Perfection flat bed scanners. The performance on scanning is close to the performance of the film. Yes a dedicated

*expensive* slide scanner can do better, but for home use the flatness are very good.

[JohnW]

Ebay isn't always cheapest - Amazon =A3133, Pixmania =A3126

John

[Clive George]

Ebay is often more expensive so yes, always worth trying elsewhere too. The strange bit with ebay happens with the auctions where they get bid to prices higher than new. Seems like people don't know to check.

[Davey]

Indeed, I see one offered for =C2=A382. Good value.

--=20 Davey.

[Rick Hughes]

Beat scanner that I found when I went loo0king was Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV

They can be found for reasonable prices on eBay.

[Bill Wright]

Why not project them and photograph the screen? If done with care this gives excellent results. There are some tricks to it mind you.

Bill

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

A couple of years ago, studios were flogging off all that old equipment. Pro light boxes and tables going for peanuts.

[News]

In message , RustyCrampon writes

Just a thought. Rather than spend a hundred pounds or more on a scanner that will probably only be used once for that type of job, would it not be easier to use one of the labs that offer the same service? Probably a lot quicker than d-i-y :-)

There are sellers on eBay offering the service at 20p per slide, transferred to disc.