BBurns Loc: South Bay, California

Hi, I am new to Hedgehog but have followed it for a while.

When I liquidated all of my Canon FD stuff, I made it a point to hang onto the 50mm Macro and the Auto-Bellows/slide copier. Specifically because I can mount my 5D MkII with an adapter and have a 21mp copier for some of my select stuff. I don’t care if all of the half blurry grandkids shots are copied on a 5 or 6 meg gizmo.

CHASEPLACEMAIL Loc: Ct,Fla

I found it less expensive to process the slides I had at Costco. The number of slides I had didn't justify the purchase of a separate scanner at the time. They did a good job.

noel Loc: Virginia

Not feasable if you have quite a number of slides. A table stand,dlsr with macro lens, and a lightbox will do a quick digital conversation rather than a film scanner.

Italianbigmouth

I had 5,000 plus slides (Plus 12,000 negatives) done by Scan Cafe' in California! Took a long time, but it was very sparingly expensive, well done, although make sure that they catalogue strips or boxes according to the notes included with them. Cannot recommend'em high enough. ScanCafe is great.

DrPhrogg Loc: NJ

Agree. I would like opinions on how fast various machines are? The Canon 8800F takes about 1 minute per slide, including changes.

Blue Spark Loc: Sandy Springs, GA

Dr. J - forget doing the conversion yourself or having your brother in laws uncle do it. Choose a company that specializes in the task, box 'em up and send them off.

You're welcome!
:)

hj Loc: Florida

Dr J, everybody has an opinion so you need to do what YOU want to do. You've already decided to use the wolverine FD2 and you will find it easy and fun. Consider that you will only have between $100 & $150 invested depending on which model you choose and then you can sell it on eBay and get a portion of your money back as I did. Even better, if you haven't already bought one, consider eBay as you'll get a much better price on a used one which typically is being sold only because the seller has completed their own conversion.

Hunakai

I have and still use a Nikon coolscan IV for 35mm slides and negatives, and the quality of the scans are astounding, although a bit slow (it's USB1.1, so now you know how old it is). I have scanned 35mm b&w negatives as well as chromes from pre-WWII as a family history project and the results are such that I can zoom in on a scanned file and read labels on bottles and jars.
Going back even further, I've scanned larger negatives of so many sizes on an Epson V750 with also stunning success. The V750 is so versatile with so many negative mask sizes available. And, if you don't have the proper mask, you can cut one to fit. It never ceases to amaze me all the information there is in a negative or chrome when properly scanned.
Now that I've blabbered on about all that, I will say I've never scanned any 35mm chromes or negs on the Epson750, but compared to the large negs (and printed art) I've scanned, I cannot imagine it wouldn't work just fine for the 35mm work I assume you are attempting.
Both the Nikon scanner and the Epson scanner came with many auto-correcting firmware built-ins, and found them very useful for removing dust, organic growth and such, but with minimal image degredation when applied, however, they will not work for b&w material. However, I did discover a trick that works pretty well on the Nikon if you are scanning b&w and want to apply the correcting applications.
That's my experience, if you wish to talk about it further, reply and we may.
Good luck and may your project go well. There are so many valuable chromes and negatives out there in the world whose images must be preserved, and shared.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

It depends upon what you want to do with the digital images.

If you want high quality scans for fairly big prints or other high end use of the images, get a dedicated 35mm film scanner. It is not a fast process, but worthwhile to do it right, do it once, if you want good quality.

I have been using a Nikon LS4000ED scanner for many years. It's one of the few models that can load a stack of slides and process them automatically (cost about $1700 for the scanner and another $400 for the slide feeder, back in the day). This gives 4000 dpi, 16 bit TIFFs that are 130MB, but even with Firewire 400 connectivity it takes about 10 or 15 minutes per scan (16X oversampling). I used to just put a stack of around 40 slides in it and let it run overnight.

Recently got it out to scan some negs for a friend and found out that there's no Nikon software support for more recent versions of Windows, so I ended up buying a copy of Vuescan and that worked pretty well.

If I were shopping today I would probably buy the Plustek 8200i scanner... 7200 dpi, 24 and 48 bit depth, plus it's bundled with the best scanning software anyone ever offered.... Silverfast AI (it's pretty complicated, though... Vuescan is simpler and much easier to use. 8 second previews and claims 113 second scans ath highest resolution and bit depth! $400 at B&H Photo (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/883631-REG/Plustek_783064365338_OpticFilm_8200i_Ai_Film.html).

There are some Pacific Images scanners of similar specification and same or lower price that I might consider, too.

Watch out for cheap film scanners. They may give something adequate for a 4x6 or 5x7 print, but not much larger.

I also have never seen a flatbed scanner that's anywhere close to the dynamic range and resolution of the dedicated film scanners... but, hey, I really haven't been looking lately, so there might be some good ones to consider.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

I would avoid flat-bed-scanners, as they will just not give you very good results (when compared to dedicated film scanners)! Another option is to send them out and have them scanned (like ScanCafe~at about 23 cents per scan). Their quality is decent and all the scans are send back to you on a disk, or several.

fdoyle3 Loc: Glenolden Pa.

I have Several thousand slides going back to 1948 I have been digitizing them with a Plustek 7500 it is slow but .it does a great job. I am selective as to what I process.

Chalybeateman Loc: Camden County Georgia

Got to ScanCafe.com I had them do mine and they turned out perfectly.

mtbear

I've used the Wolverine. You get a 19Mpx image but it is a low quality jpg at about 2 Mb file size. It is OK to use for cataloging though. I've tried it with slides but having around 40,000 slides to scan I prefer to use my Powerslide 3600 which does 50 slides at a time. It's old and the newer version does 5000 dpi but it's also $1100, which I can't afford.

valley3photo

I have done more than ten thousand slides in the last two years with a CanoScan 9000F scanner. It does an excellent job.

granpa steve Loc: north fort myers, fl

wolverine F2D works good