Soldarity wrote:
What can I expect to pay? Can folks sugges particular models including
older used models that i might find on ebay or craigslist?
A decent resolution would be nice but as th itle says my budget is
very tight these days.

-jerry in seattle

I've been using an Epson 4900 PHOTO scanner with good results. The
scanner's ability to resolve medium format and larger is overkill IMHO.

For 35mm, I have found by trial & error that a 2400 dpi scan of
Kodachrome 25 slides will generally begin to reveal film grain just
before image pixels are visible, yielding approximately a 1.2 to 1.8 mb
file size per slide.

The scanner came with plastic frames to hold 4x 35mm strips, 8x 35mm
slides, 3x 2.25 filmstrips (two exposures each if you shoot square
format), and 2x 4x5 negatives/positives.

I'm pretty happy with this scanner. Last time I scanned, I was doing
2.25 format with a 400mHz P3 PC running WinXP. I've also done 8x 35mm
slides with this setup. Both scans were *very* slow with this setup, as
in 20 - 30 minutes/frame until finished. However, the finished scan was
worth the time. In any case, one can get everything set up, start the
scanning, and go do something else for a while.

I suppose that my only software complaint here is that there is no easy
way for the 4900 PHOTO user to know in advance, given a computer's
overall processing power, at what chosen scanning resolution vs. CPU
speed and available memory will the Epson scanning program be paging
scanned data to disk (very slow) rather than performing all scanning
operations entirely in memory (much faster).

Next time, I'll be using a 1.6gHz P4 PC, XP, and things *should* be
considerably faster. Ironically, I also have a Sun Ultra-45 which has a
1.6gHz 64-bit processor w/4gb RAM, but no software interface for the
Epson :-( Something along these lines, Epson-compatible, would be a
definite plus. There are certainly plenty of new PCs available which
could take advantage of this scanner's outstanding abilities and deliver
excellent scanned files much faster than what I have outlined here.

The 4900 PHOTO also comes with proprietary "dust & scratch" software. My
experience with this is that it needs lots of RAM, so the more you have,
the quicker the process from start to finish.

-- Max.