What's the best & cheapest way to transfer 40 year old slides to digital disk?

Question

I have over 100 slides from my military days in Korea & VietNam. I don't want to spend a lot of money. Some are so old the're starting to fade away. HELP!

Answer 1

That would be great to saves these slides for the next generation.

As bocoo man answered... most scanners will do the job, but the average price is $250.00 for a good flatbed scanner.

Check out this website, they charge $0.24 per slide. Not too bad. http://scancafe.com/index_adwords1.php?gclid=CNjqyuG1mIgCFREDGAodTx6TNA

Answer 2

I would call up several photo labs and get prices. most places have digital labs and slide masks and will sometimes take you order for 'call when ready' I work in a photo lab. our slide mask is broken and is tricky to do slides,and we have to wait for a slow time to do it, and sometime telling people the 1 hour is 2 hours. the person who said they'll do it while you wait and Wed at 10 am is slow, it's not like that at all were I work. It can be unpredictable and well have a rush out of nowhere. they will usually charge per slide scan, or a flat fee of 10$ for up to 40 slide and 25 cants for each slide after that, for example. or someplace will make a high resolution and restore them on the CD for a hefty price.

If you want to preserve them and maybe make 4x6's, a 1.5 mp resolution image is fine. once there in the CD, put them on your computer and restore colour or enhance them using a program of your choice. Kodak easyshare has a no brainier program you can download.

Or if you want to scan them your self on your computer some scanner can do that. we have an epson scanner for about$120. it can with a tray with slide slots and can restore them. but it does 3 at a time and could take awhile. it might be better to take them somewhere to get done for you

Answer 3

Here's a place that says they will do it for 35¢ a slide scanned to 2,000 dpi, which is decent. The price goes up to 45¢ for 3,000 dpi and 65¢ for 4,000 dpi. They have a $100 minumum order, though, so if you have "only" 150 slides, you may as well go for the highest resolution. When you get your images back, the higher the resolution, the easier they are going to be to work on. This is WAY cheaper than buying a $600 scanner to get the same resolution at home.

http://www.myspecialphotos.com/scanning.asp

Answer 4

Wal*Mart will do it for 29 cents each. I go in on a Wednesday at 10:00 am - that is their slowest day - and stand there while they do it. Then I take what they have done home, edit the pictures myself for balance and brightness, etc, and burn a second CD of the edited photos. This is the cheapest way. They come out 1.0 - 1.5 MB each, and you get a 100 KB preview of each on the CD.

Answer 5

There is no, cheap and easy way. The two are mutually exclusive, the easy way would be to take them into a photo lab, they have the tools to get them converted. Also if you have a digital camera and a projector, you could take pictures of the slides on the wall. You will need to expirement to get it all just right

Answer 6

The easiest way to do it is to take them into a film lab and have clean and scan them. It's not the cheapest way, but it produces the best result because they have the professional (high DPI) scanners that are already set up for it.

If you (hopefully, but not likely) have the negatives, the photo lab can produce even better quality digitals than scanning the slides.

Answer 7

Most scanners have the ability to scan slides to your hard drive and than you can save them to a CD or DVD. It is quite simple and they are preserved.

Answer 8

you can buy slide scanners pretty cheaply these days (check out Best Buy), then scan away and save them to your computer! then burn a CD. If I were doing it I'd do it myself, saves money and more enjoyable

Answer 9

If you have a scanner it will do it, my HP3570 has a slot for slides

Answer 10

I think bocoo man is right i will do what he recommends.