CLP1943 Loc: Wisconsin

I have several thousand color slides that I would like to digitize and save to disk. I did purchase a good Canon flatbed scanner made for this, but the process is extremely time consuming.

I'm now thinking it would be much faster to copy the slides with some sort of setup and my DSLR.

I'm sure some of you do it this way. Could you please explain your setup, how you illuminate the slides and expose for them? A picture of your setup would be extremely helpful. Thanks.

jim quist Loc: Missouri

When we still used film I had an attachment on my lens that held a slide. I took a picture of it with the camera on auto. It was that easy to transfer slides to film.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yea, my old flatbed did slides, one at a time. I cheated, I bought a slide/negative scanner for under $100.

lev29 Loc: Born and living in MA.

Just my opinion, but if you value your slide collection that much, why are you fooling around with a flatbed scanner or contemplating using your dSLR (in my opinion, the worst way to copy a slide, and sloooww to boot, given difficulties in alignment and distortion if the planes of the slide and the camera sensor are not absolutely parallel,) when you can buy a dedicated slide/negative scanner with dpi resolution in the thousands compared with a flatbed? Yes, some of those fancy scanners do have optional accessories you a whole stack of slides can be done at once. I'm planning to buy such a set-up after I move out of state. 😊

lev29 😎

CLP1943 Loc: Wisconsin

Hi lev29. Could you give me a name of a dedicated slide/negative scanner that you're thinking of? I'd like to check that out.

lev29 Loc: Born and living in MA.

I genuinely wish I could tell you about the latest ones, but my knowledge is probably out of date. I'm waiting till after I move back North (or out West) before I survey the offerings again.

By the way, the OP's idea of using his camera is not entirely ridiculous. In the pre-digital era, it may have the best way, certainly the least expensive means of making a slide copy of another slide. There is/was this non-electrical gadget one would screw on the front of the lens that would the original slide; the catch was finding a sufficiently intense uniform light source of the right color temperature to transilluminate the slide.

I believe that those Nikon CoolScanners made in the last decade are still sought after. Thanks for asking.

travisdeland Loc: deland, FL

A quick search yielded this:

http://www.hammacher.com/Product/86729?cm_cat=ProductSEM&cm_pla=AdWordsPLA&source=PRODSEM&gclid=CPKZg9CLzssCFRIbgQod9oALug

it was the only scanner I saw that you could stack the slides

lev29 Loc: Born and living in MA.

I appreciate your searching, BUT Hammacher-Schl... is one of those Brookstone.com kind of hack pseudo-luxury catalog retailers. They just spied one product to add to their collection. I posit that your internet search was inadequate. You would need to search first for the serious slide scanners, and then for each research what kind of accessories they. I've found that most search engines won't follow a series of specific commands, e.g. Sigma lenses made before 2017 but only those with E-mount and an optical filter size of 67 mm. This means doing a series of searches. Hence, I'm not surprised that simplistic "quick" search doesn't turn up much. But please plug away!😄👍🏻

GoofyNewfie Loc: Kansas City

I have 2 Nikon Coolscan LS 2000 units with slide stack loaders at work.
The only drawbacks are Nikon doesn't support it with newer windows computers and the slides jam if your mounts aren't in good shape. VueScan software is a pretty good substitute and does some things the Nikon software never did like automatic cropping. Another positive thing you can't get with using your camera is the dust and scratch removal. The Nikon (and other scanners, I believe) mKe a red, blue, green and infrared pass of the slide. Anything picked up in the infrared pass is dust or a scratch and the software does a very good job of suppressing them. Won't work with black & white negatives.

When you're done scanning, you could sell it.

Budnjax Loc: NE Florida

for several thousand slides I would find a commercial copier to dupe them for you, otherwise you're going to be spending many days at the scanner. I have an old Konica/Minolta scanner that works pretty well but I wouldn't even attempt to do thousand on it. A high quality scan takes several minutes each after cleaning the slide.

travisdeland Loc: deland, FL

My search my be inadequate, but I'm not the one looking for a slide scanner-just trying to show that a little effort to help yourself can generally yield some answers. As far as plugging away-NOT MY JOB.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

If you're going to copy the slides yourself, make sure they're clean. When you blow up that little slide, the dirt will be blown up, too

Two choices for copying. ScanCafe is excellent, but it costs about $0.35 per slide for 35mm.

http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=slide+copier
http://opteka.com/slidecopier.aspx
http://www.scancafe.com/services/slide-scanning

wotsmith Loc: Nashville TN

I have scanned about 10,000 slides with my Nikon coolscan; and the above is all true about the software. I "softened" the spring load on my autoloader and it jams way less. I have more to scan then I"ll sell it. I think it is in the neighborhood of 4000 DPI

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Dust is a problem. @.35 per slide for only 2000 slides not thousands is $700.00 to do. This has been asked other times as well recently.
As I have said previously the Epson V750, now V850 do an absolutely incredible job. From Dec. to mid Feb I scanned over 2000 slides and an equal number of negatives that were mostly from old Kodak fold out cameras where I had to take a 4x5 film holder and cut a custom mask for the negs.
For scanning I set up in the living room and watched TV shows, ate dinners, played with the cats and even spoke with my wife. So for the few minutes it took to scan 12 slides at a time I found other activities including culling old slides that now seemed not worth saving.
This scanner for the money is incredible and does all formats up to 8x10. I also scanned hundreds of old prints from the turn of the past century as well. My wife has now put most on facebook and the extended family are freaking out about the hundreds of historical photos they can access from many generations past. This is why I do it to share with not just close family but relative distant family. I got the film and photos from my grandfathers house just before they were boxed up to throw it all in the garbage.
Again this scanner is incredible, medium speed, makes lighting and color corrections during the scan if you want and is so good for what you want to do.
No it is not dedicated, no it is not a slide duplicator, I have one and this beats it in speed and accuracy, yes you have a flatbed now but this model is great and is cheaper than scanning thousands commercially.
Good luck.

ddonlewis

CLP1943
I'm now retired, and I've been doing various historical photo projects for my family over the last few years and I've tried just about every alternative with slides. First let me say there is no shortcut to quality. We live in a mircrowave world, but there is no shortcut to doing a good job. I tried various attachments on my DSLR and none of them did a good job. Flatbed scanners work, but the dedicated slide/negative scanner is the best. I bought a Plustek scanner from B&H for about $250. Quality is great, but it only copies one at a time. Between the prescan and scan it takes about 3 minutes per slide. I can probably do about 20 per hour. Yes it takes lots of time. You'll have to decide what your time is worth. Someone recommended a scanning service for .35-40 cents per. You can buy a scanner and spend 175 hours scanning or pay someone $1,200 to $1,500 to do the job.