What's the best way to turn my slides into jpegs?

Question

I have a slide projector and thousands of slides but I want to turn them into digital jpegs so I can put them onto DVDs and save them. How can I do that without spending an arm and a leg?

Answer 1

Probably the best way, with the highest quality, is to buy a dedicated film scanner and do it yourself. Might be several hundred dollars, but when you're through (which will take a long, long time) you can resell it for about the same price. For some reason, film scanners hold their value pretty well. Some flatbed scanners can scan slides as well, with less quality than the film scanners.

In my lab, we scan slides and burn to CD for .39 each, but the scans are barely 1 megapixel, and look too contrasty. And I could not take a thousand slide scan order, there are too many other things to be done, and scanning slides is very time consuming.

They also make slide adapters that attach to your digital camera. Then you snap a digital copy directly in your camera card. That would be the cheapest, and maybe the easiest to do yourself, but I've not seen the result, so I can't advise if it's any good.

Professional labs scan slides with good quality, but you will pay handsomely for that service.

Realistically, you will have to spend at least an arm, and invest a lot of time to convert your slides.

Answer 2

I had an adapter to copy slides using my digital camera, but after doing a few (successfully), I decided it would be better to get a scanner. I have a Nikon Coolscan V-ED and most highly recommend it. Yeah, it's about $600, but as you can see, at 39¢ each, "thousands of slides" will cost you more than that. Yeah, it WILL take time to do the job and clean up the scans, but it's going to be a rainy winter, isn't it? It all depends on what your final purpose for the scans will be, but I prefer to do huge scans, because they are easier to work with. After I have them all cropped and dusted, I can shrink them down to 300 ppi before I archive the file.

I agree with Ara. Get a scanner and get started.