Slide Scanning

[major_clanger]

I've got a pile of old 35mm slides, including some nice Kodachromes from a school trip to Pompeii back in 1982. Does anyone have experience of slide-scanning services and any recommendations?

Comments

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

No recommendations, but I'd love to see them when they're done.

[timill]

There's just been a long thread on Cix on the subject, and the conclusion was that DIY was the best option.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

I looked into this for a customer some years back (quite a few years back) and the conclusion was that unless you had absolutely boatloads of money to throw at it, the scanning services weren't going to be feasible. Know any students who need a (very dull) holiday job? :)

[bellinghwoman.livejournal.com]

Depends how many slides you've got. A quick search on ebay found companies that charge 16p per slide, but if you've got more than a couple of hundred (and are willing to spend the time, of course!), it'd be cheaper to buy a slide scanner, do it yourself and then re-sell the scanner when you're done.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

When I wanted to do this a few years ago (but with negatives rather than slides) I bought a second hand SCSI film scanner on eBay. What a pain! It took several minutes tedious work to scan each photo. Removing every speck of dust from the film was the main problem; that and the horrible scanning software that required manual adjustments for every frame. Then a dust particle got inside the scanning head which caused a line to appear on the output (as far as I could tell there was no way to fix this short of dismantling it and cleaning it inside a clean room). The software also only worked on Windows 2000, so the thing is now a doorstop because I don't have a W2K PC any more.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest DIY. I haven't used a commercial service since I had the BBC's money to spend. Now I have three wardrobes / 40 years of parents' slides to scan.

50 quid buys you a usable scanner based on phone camera imaging and screen, dumping to an SD card (try Farnell). Not great, but quick. Two six-slot push-through magazines, so you can re-load one whilst processing the next.

Next step up is my £300 HP slide scanner. Nice bit of kit, even nicer if you strip the mounts, but it still needs a Windows 95 machine for its pseudo-SCSI drivers (I keep one for just this).

Paper scanners make very poor slide scanners, even if they did come with an add-on light box.

The ultimate is someone like Redcliff in Bristol (who we used commercially). They strip the mounts, wash, and use an oil immersion scanner. Best quality, but $$$$! Commercial services who strip the mounts cost real money, scanning whilst in the mount is no better than DIY grade.

IMHO, best approach is two-pass scanning. Scan the lot quickly with a cheap "staring" scanner, then re-do the dusty ones and the good ones, ideally with a better quality scanner. I don't wash mine before scanning, but I do wash and dry whole boxes if they turn out to be dirty (a dirty slide is usually a boxful of dirty slides). I also strip mounts (and scan as bare film) if they're old card mounts, or Agfa that have cockled. I usually strip glass mounts too, because my glassed slides were the good stuff, but they're also well-travelled and probably dirty. Some scanners can be a problem with glassed slides, even if they're not showing obvious Newton's rings.

You also need organisation and a plan for metadata. Minimum metadata is an auto-allocated unique ID for each box and the ID within it (just 1-36 is OK). I catch manual metadata at the box level (from old sticky labels on the box ends, date / location / filmstock etc.) and only rarely add more to this per image (titling the good / interesting stuff, recording anything previously sold / competition winning). Some crude Python (or Perl) shoves this as a batch into the EXIF for each image. I also dump XML versions per directory (box) and can (manyana) populate this into a central database.

My metadata use Dublin Core / RDF / Bath profile standards, so it's easy to move it around later. The box IDs are pre-printed on some new sticky labels, which also identify boxes as "scanned".

Teenagers are useless for outsourcing, elderly aunts are far better.

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

Buy a scanner (a 35mm scanner, not a paper scanner with a slide carrier) and do it yourself. Maplin have a special offer on cheap slide scanners at the moment, but I don't know how good these are; I use a relatively upmarket Minolta scanner.