Digitizing old 35MM slides

[BarryinMN]

Anyone have tips or sources for converting 35MM slides?

I have about 400 from the late '50's & early 60's. There is a grand total of 2 tractor related. Allis Chalmers Model C or CA.

Anyone know the history of slides? Invention date, peak popularity of these things, etc?

 

[Muhammad]

Some flatbed scanners have attachments to scan slides. Resolution won't be the best, but it will give you enough quality to reprint them at 4x6.

If you wanted to scan all of them at high resolution to reprint at larger sizes (say, 8x10 or 11x14) your best bet would be a dedicated film scanner. You can get good ones on eBay for ~$300 (Nikon Coolscan IV, for example).

 

[RobertN]

I have a little bit older HP Scanjet 5370 flatbed scanner. It has an adapter that allows scanning of slides and other transparencies. It works very well, and can make a very nice 8x10. 11x17 is pushing it a bit. I think it will run like 1200dpi, which is decent.

You can get dedicated scanners. They will scan at 2400dpi and higher.

I would take them to a good photography shop or print shop. Most can scan slides for a fee, and put them on a CD for you.

I do not know the dates on slides, but they have been around for decades.

The advantage to slides is they are typically very high resolution small grained film. They typically are great for enlargement; we have a number of enlargements from our trips to Alaska and Canada.

Slides are also inexpensive to develop and mount. Once mounted, they are easy to view while deciding which ones you want to enlarge. Remember, Pro's will shoot dozens of photo's of a subject from different angles, different lighting, different apereture/shutter settings ect. It is less expensive to shoot a bunch, develop, and view, to decide on that one perfect shot that goes in the magazine.

Slides do have a downfall, in that they require exact exposure settings for shutter and apeture. If you are barely off, the slide will either be dark or washed out. It is common to bracket slides, taking a picture at correct exposure, and one a little over and another a little under exposed, looking for that perfect medium.

A lot of that has been superceded with digital though. you can do all that very quickly with digital.

For high resolution shots or major enlargement though, slide film still has its uses. An ASA 64 or slower slide film has tiny grain. To match the resolution, you would need like a 24mega-pixel digital camera.

 

[Bird]

I had a thousand slides, made with a cheap camera in the '60s and '70s; 100 per carousel type tray and 10 trays. But the trays and projector were Keystone brand, the projector died and I couldn't find parts and the trays wouldn't fit other projectors. So last Fall, my youngest daughter and grandson knew I was shopping and looking at scanners, pricing the cost of having someone else convert them to CDs, etc., but I never decided what to do, since it looked like the cost would be $250 and up, plus a lot of time that I didn't have right then. Sometimes procrastination pays off. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif My Christmas present from the daughter was the slides on both CD and DVD, and the DVD also has a couple of reels of the old Super 8mm home movies that I also had. I don't know what it cost, but she had a local company do it.

 

[reb]

I bought a Canon D1250U2F scanner a couple of years ago. It has an adapter for slides and will scan at 2400 dpi. I have printed several 8 1/2 x 11 pictures that I find quite satisfactory (maybe not professional quality, but equal to my skills as a photographer). The problem I have noticed is that often the pictures need a lot of cleanup from dust on the slides. Adobe Photoshop Elements does a pretty good job.

 

[Av8r3400]

Check with your local film developer/camera shop. They often offer this service of putting old negetives or slides to CD/DVD format. As bird said they can do super 8 too.

 

[RobertN]

Remember when you use slides, you can dust them with those small can of compressed air/gas.

Also, when you scan or enlarge, there is a margin of the slide that you lose if you leave them in the holder. You are only getting about 85-90% of the frame... They can be dismounted. Some photoshops sell new frames to remount the slides.

We have shot TONS of slides, and had a number of them enlarged. When we get the slide back, it is always in new frame/mount.

 

[reb]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( you can dust them with those small can of compressed air/gas. )</font>

I'll have to try that--I've been using a camel-hair brush on a plastic bulb to blow off the dust.

As for not getting the full frame--I haven't found that to be a big problem. I frequently want to crop the picture a bit anyway.

 

[_RaT_]

I have hundreds of slides to go through and sort (toss the junk) and digitize the rest. Back in the 70's and 80's all I did was slides. Unfortunately, with slides, the color on my predominantly Kodachrome transparency film is getting pretty bad, I can imagine the folks with slides from the 60's have some pretty muted color. My 90's Fuji Velvia transparencies are still decent so the sooner you get the film converted to digital, the better off you are. I have access to a Coolscan 8000 which is slow. It's going to take awhile.

 

[jinman]

I have an HP dedicated slide and film scanner, but it is painfully slow. If you can get a carousel slide projector and screen set up, you can just project the images and shoot them with a digital camera mounted on a tripod. It won't be as high a resolution as a scanner, but most likely you will be looking at them on a 72 dpi monitor screen and it really won't matter. Don't even worry about whether the slides are upside down or backwards when you load them in the trays. After you get them all in digital form, it's a simple process to rotate and mirror the images. This is about the quickest way I know of doing the conversion.

The hard thing these days is finding a slide projector. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif