Transferring 35mm slides to digital?

[apillowofclouds]

I have several thousand 35mm slides that my parents took of every event from their honeymoon in 1963 all the way until my father passed away last year. I am very anxious to transfer all of these pictures to digital format so that they can be preserved somewhere and also so that I can make online photo galleries. Does anyone know of a shop in the Long Island, NY area that I can trust to do a better job than I will of scanning them properly and to handle them like gold since they are irreplacable? I thought about trying to scan them myself but with this many slides I only want to do it once and I'm not an expert at what settings to use etc. TIA from a new member!

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum.

Scanning them yourself might be a pain in the butt, however, it might save you quite a lot of money...if that's an issue. I would imagine that having a lab scan individual slides would be fairly expensive.

A dedicated film scanner with 'Digital Ice' technology (to reduce dust spots) would cost a few hundred dollars but then the valuable slides need not ever leave your home. It may take some practice to get the settings right, but after that...it should be an easy, all be it, tedious task.

 

[Rob]

Hi there, welcome!

I have a Nikon CoolScan V and it has a slide attachment, but it takes approximately 7 minutes to scan one picture. If you have 3,000 slides, that's about 2 weeks of sitting at the computer 24hrs a day.

The shop machines will scan in a couple of seconds at a moderate resolution, but they're going to charge you a good amount for each one... working on 3,000 - that's a lot of money.

I guess you're best off adding up the pros and cons of DIY vs shop and paying very careful attention to the budgeting as well. You can always sell the scanner afterwards!

Shops are very unlikely to damage a mounted slide, but accidents happen, so you'd be best off doing it in small(ish) batches I reckon.

With a number like that, perhaps it's worth thinking about some kind of serious profesional service and phoning around?

Good luck!