Need Advice on Digitizing Slides

Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Thanks,

Mirsky

Mirsky wrote:

Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Thanks,

Mirsky

There are actually some scanner groups, Mirsky, where they may be a
little more up on the subject, that is if you don't get a good
response here.

alt.comp.periphs.scanner
comp.periphs.scanner


--
Paul (Take my hand, I'm standing right here)
-------------------------------------------------------
Stop and Look
http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/

"Mirsky" wrote in message
...
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Thanks,

Mirsky


This vendor will give you an idea how much scanning that volume would cost:

http://www.discountdigitalart.com/slides.html

Probably a good idea to let them do it rather than buying a scanner. IMHO

Jim Waggener

Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?


I don't know what your time is worth or what level of technical skills
you have but I was in the same situation. I purchased a Nikon Coolscan
V ED on eBay for about $550, worked all summer scanning the slides -
shared the unit with a buddy who then did the same. We then resold the
unit on Bay for almost what we paid for it $500 or so - total cost in
dollars was nil but it DOES take a lot of time. Results were excellent,
though.



--
Seinfeld Lists http://tinyurl.com/f7k9d
California Photos http://tinyurl.com/ann2l
Sawyer's Nicknames http://tinyurl.com/gowma

In article
,
Mirsky wrote:

Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

If your mother is "well to do" take the store. the cost will be many
times the cost of a slide scanner.

But, if she is bored and would like to re-live the content of the slides
one at a time, buy her a Nikon Cool Scan V and set her to work.
Needless to say, the results of this method will certainly reduce her
credit card bills!

In either case, the need to "edit' some of the picts using PSE will be
about the same. Altho, the disks from the "photo scanning company" will
be on CD or DVD and thus constitute a back-up that she will not have to
make.

"Mirsky" wrote in message
...
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Thanks,

Mirsky
It would be much cheaper to do the scanning herself. By the time that she
gets that many slide scans done, she will savvy about doing at least that
job.
Jim

Suggest you scan those old photos with a scanner,then create them to
photo slideshow by DVD burned. Your mom will view the slideshow on TV
or DVD player easily.

So you can try Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder for free trial.
http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/dvd-slideshow-builder.html

I think your mom isn't afraid those memoried photos.

Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Before I get into your question, the only thing I'd question that was
posted earlier is that a flatbed scanner will do as good a job as a
dedicated film scanner. I haven't gone to the time and expense of
trying both, but the research I did said the opposite: For best results
use a dedicated film scanner. That's not to say my research is right
and the other poster is wrong. Just to alert you to the fact that there
is a difference of opinion.

Turning to self-scans vs. paying someone, I am in a somewhat similar
situation and have scanned about 800 slides and negatives so far on my
own -- and still have a lot to go. There are clear tradeoffs and I'm
still not sure which way I'll go on the rest, or what mixture I'll use.
Here's what I found:

One scanning service I tried did a horrible job. Another did a great
job. So, before committing 5,000 slides to one or another serivce, I'd
like to see the results of a test sample. Ideally you'd also scan the
same slides yourself (maybe borrowing someone's scanner) and compare.
My horrible scans cost $0.80 each and my great ones cost $1.50 each.
That's not to say that price and quality are always correlated, but it
does say that 5,000 slides are likely to cost $5,000. That's a lot
compared to the $600 I spent on my DiMAGE Scan Elite II, but I spend
several minutes on each slide I scan. And if I use PSE (PhotoShop
Elements) on it, allow another few minutes per slide. So, if your time
is worth more than $20 or $30 an hour, it's "cheaper" to have an
outside place do the scans.

Even though I value my time at more than that, I'm still doing scans on
my own. Why? As someone else pointed out, it's an opportunity to relive
each slide's memories.

Plus, I'm getting almost 20 Megapixel scans vs. only 5 Mp from the
"great" outside shop. My scanner will do 80 Mp scans, but 20 Mp is
plenty for all but the top few pictures that I might want to blow up
into posters at some time. And, at 20 Mp, each scan is 60 MB. At 80 Mp
they'd be 240 MB (almost a quarter of a gig!) each. While storage is
getting cheap (a little under $1 per gig external), that still adds a
non-trivial expense (tho getting cheaper over time) plus it loads the
CPU needlessly on most pictures. Even once I've compressed to JPEG for
storage on my internal drive (keeping the TIFFs on the external
drive!), the 80 Mp pictures would take a long time to open and display
on my 1.7 Mp screen. Admittedly, I zoom in on some and there the 20 Mp
is nice to have. But 80 is probably overkill on most.

Another advantage to scanning myself is I sometimes will crop at scan
time instead of afterward. Not a big advantage, but still there.

So why might I have an outside service do some or most of my remaining
scans? At the rate I'm going, I might be dead before I finish my 5,000
scans. An outside service does it quickly. There's still a lot of work
to organize the pictures, and PS takes about as much time as a scan,
but if I am strong, I can resist the temptation to fix EVERY photo, and
save that for the really good ones. Or do them first and come back to
the others if there's time.

Also, the good outside service seems to do some exposure and color
correction that is equivalent to many of the changes I can make with
PSE. That really saves time!

And, if I find a slide they've scanned that I really love, I can always
scan it myself and take lots of time on it.

If you scan yourself, here are a few things I've learned (any
corrections to things I've mislearned are welcome):

I've found that auto-exposure helps on both slides and negatives. The
default setting on my scanner was AE on negatives only. Early on, I
tended to use additional manual exposure compensation (over and above
what AE did) on dark slides, but tended to overdo it and got "blown
out" whites. Better to use less compensation on the scan and use PSE or
similar to fix via Levels, etc. Now I get good shadow detail, without
blown out whites. It took a while to learn what helped in PSE, so allow
some time for learning/experimenting. In my experience, Auto Smartfix
tends to overdo it, but 10-20% Adjust Smartfix (another option) seemed
to work better. Lately, I'm using Levels and Autolevels more. No one
method works best on all pictures, which adds to the time it takes.

If you have a Mac get GraphicConverter ($30 shareware). It will do
batch renames and batch resizing, etc. Before I had GC, I had to rename
each scan (e.g., TRAY15.tif0047 where the 0047 was an index added by
the scanner software). Each time I did that the Mac OS asked me if I
really wanted to change the extension! GC handled it nicely. Similarly,
if you want to create smaller than 20 Mp pictures and/or limit the file
size, GC does that very nicely. I imagine there's similar SW for
Windows, but don't know what it is.

My scanner software has ICE, ROC (restoration of color) and GEM (grain
reduction). I use ICE all the time and it really helps. ROC and GEM
don't seem to work so well and I've used PSE instead to restore color
that wasn't what I wanted and to reduce noise. I also didn't find that
noise reduction via multiple scans helped much if at all, so I've
stopped using it.

Hoping this helps.

Martin

Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year
period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if
she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a
photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy
about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a
professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that.
In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies
that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend?

Thanks,

Mirsky


To put things in perspective, a basic scan with a dedicated film scanner
will take at least 3 minutes/slide. It will take MUCH longer if you get
fancy and use Digital ICE and/or some of the other image enhancing
software.
For 5,000 slides you are looking at 15,000 minutes or 250 hours!!!!
Working 2.5 hours/day, every day, 7 days/week you are looking at over 3
months to complete the job. If Mom isn't very computer savvy, multiply
that time by 1.5 or 2.
Bottom Line......It ain't gonna happen.

Let me suggest two approaches.
1. Almost certainly, not all 5,000 slides are "keepers".
So choose the top 10%.....That's still more images than most people
will voluntarily look at.
2. Let "Discount Digital Art" (Jim Waggener's suggested site) do a
Deluxe scan for 45¢/slide. That is one helluva bargain for a 9MP image
cropped, color corrected and treated with Digital ICE.
For $225 the job will ACTUALLY get done with no muss and no fuss and you
and your mom can get on with your lives..

If mom has a REAL interest in Digital Photography, you might consider
getting a Nikon Coolpix 5600 and a Nikon slide copier adapter for about
$225 total. Then let her copy her choices of slides. That method takes
about 0.5 minutes per slide and you end up with a 5 MP image.......WAY,
WAY more resolution than you need for viewing on a TV or Computer.
That's plenty good enough for making 8x10 enlargements of the creme de
la creme images
Bob Williams

I don't know if it has been discussed already, but you also need a lot
of disc space to store the 5000 scans in high quality.
So buying an external (or internal) disc will also be necessary.

But indeed, very time-consuming is the major issue here!
I'd go for the $225 professional scan.

-Kris
http://photoblog.krisvdv.net