It’s time to think about digitizing slides that you might find in your old desk or parents’ garage. The world gets more digital every year, and it’s the best way to preserve family memories for generations to come. Analog media is precious, and often documents some of our most important moments. However, as time goes on, these forms of media can and will degrade. As you may know, the best solution to this problem is to somehow find the time or money to get all of these images digitized. Depending on the quantity of images, this can be quite a daunting task for any individual. With the right game-plan, and preparation, it could turn out to be a fun, engaging project that will bring your whole family together.
The first step in the process is to determine how many of your slides you want to scan. This is a very important step, as it will help determine which route is best for you. There are several ways to convert slides to digital: you can use a home scanner, use an app, rent or purchase a brand new scanner, or simply have a Slide Scanning Service do it for you.
The next huge thing to consider before proceeding is to determine how much time you actually have to devote to digitize slides. For example, if you have a full-time job, a busy family life, and 1,500 slides that need to be scanned in 8 days for Grandma’s 80th birthday, doing the project yourself isn’t practical.
This is a great solution for a person with a lot of slides, a busy lifestyle, and an eye for quality. The quality of scans you’ll get will vary by the company – a lot of companies will just scan your slides on the same scanner they use for photos – so a higher end option is going to digitize your slides much better. It’s also best to use a local company. DVD Your Memories, for example, has locations in West Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, and The South Bay. Damage and loss is common for items in the mail, so we always recommend going local.
Make sure to pick a company to scan your slides that can answer your questions about what scanners they use, which has basic complimentary post-scanning editing (making sure your scans are returned to you the right way around, cropped, etc), and you don’t have to mail in to. For example, if you’re local in Southern California, here’s why our customers choose us.
Renting a scanner can be an effective method to process any number of slides. The rental will generally consist of a Nikon CoolScan of some kind, and will often come with the bulk slide loader. Don’t underestimate how much time you’ll save with one of those. However, it may be difficult to pin down a place that will rent the equipment to you. Trying local photography stores and studios may be your best bet to start looking. Renting a scanner can cost up to $300 per week, not accounting for time learning to use the machine and software, which makes this option best for people who have working knowledge of the equipment.
Bear in mind that you’re almost certainly going to need to edit some of your scans, if they’re not oriented correctly or are flipped over, so you may need specialty software for that too. We use Adobe Lightroom.
In a more digital world, you’re probably tempted to simply install an app on your phone and scan your slides with that. We won’t lie, you can get some great results scanning photos with those apps. The problem with using them to scan slides (and negatives, too) is that slides and negatives aren’t opaque. An app that scans opaque photographs can simply shear and crop the preview for a pretty good scan. It’s essentially document scanning but with color.
Once you get into scanning slides and negatives, though, the app is going to have to edit the preview in order to get a useable image. Apps will claim to digitize slides “using AI”, which is really just code for “trying to get a useable image out of a scan with a bunch of background color it needs to wash out”. You can get results that are perfectly fine that way. But those results won’t even be on par with what you’d get putting your slides on a flatbed photo scanner, let alone proper scanning methods. This solution is best if you have a very small quantity of slides and the color quality of the scans doesn’t matter at all.
Make sure to buy the right kind of scanner! If you’re going to buy a flatbed scanner, make sure it can also scan slides. The only reason to buy a flatbed instead of a devoted slide scanner is if you want to scan photos too. Some flatbeds come with special slide scanning accessories.
Typically, the accessory you would be looking for would be a new top cover that has a scanning lamp in it and is glass on the bottom of the cover, compared to the typical plastic over foam. When you place slides or film on the glass scanner bed, they are scanned with the lamp in the top cover, and the image is captured in the lower array as normal. There may also be some slide and film holders that may or may not come with the new top cover. If you do find you can buy the accessories to get the job done, then all you need to do is decide if the money and the time to do the job, fits with your needs.
There are also dedicated slide and negative scanners available to consumers. For this article I will break them down into three categories; Low-end, Medium, and high-end.
The low-end dedicated scanners are usually equipment that will actually take a 3-5 megapixel digital image of your slide rather than scanning it. These products typically cost around $100, and are much faster at transferring slides as it takes a digital image rather than a full scan. Ion Slides to PC is an example of a low-end slide scanner.
The middle ground is a very interesting place. The bottom of the middle ground, say around $250 to $350, is occupied by some compact scanners that are fully manual, but some offer scan resolutions as high as 7,200 dpi. Plustek OpticFilm 7300 is an example of a middle ground scanner.
The high end of the 35mm slide and film scanner market is occupied by the Nikon Coolscan. That’s been true for a long time. So if you want to scan at 4,000 dpi with possibly the best optics and scan quality you can find, you will part with nearly $1,100, and if you want to use a 50 slide batch processor, add another $500 to the bill. Nikon Supercoolscan 9000 is an example of a high-end scanner.
Keep in mind that most software bundled with scanner products are mediocre-at-best. Play around with the included software, but be aware that there are many, many programs available that work much better than what’s put in front of you immediately. Take some time to do some research, and seek out the most reliable and effective software for your needs.
Slide scanning is totally different from photo scanning, since slides are higher quality images. That’s true of negatives as well. A higher resolution means more information per square inch. You want to capture as much of that as possible, which is why a devoted slide scanner is best.
Resolution or (DPI) is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. So, roughly, a 35mm slide has the approximate resolution of that of a 13 megapixel digital camera image (about 3,600 dpi). So if you scan a slide at less dpi, then you limit what you can do with the final image compared with the slide. Don’t scan slides at the same dpi you’d scan photos at.
If you want to learn more, here’s a much more detailed explanation.
If you want to scan negatives, a lot of the same things in this article hold true. We’ve written more about that here. There’s also some good reasons there as to why you should always prefer scanning slides and negatives to photos.
I found this article useful in a paper I am writing at university. Hopefully, I get an A+ now!
Thanks
Bernice Franklin