Scanning high volumes of slides

[Austerby]

A friend has come to me with a request. Her father died recently and she has inherited his photographic archive, mostly boxes of slide film. He was a keen photographer and she would like to transfer many of the images to digital so asked me about using my scanner.

I have an Epson v700 with the slide holder but this will be a long and slow process to work through the inherited slides; even when they are edited down to the highlights there will still be a sizeable number.

What other options are there for scanning large numbers of mounted transparencies?

 

[.... _]

there are scanners with slide feeders out there. I think some of the Nikons had them as accessories.
Or better still a repro company which has an iqsmart (creo) as they can take 54 mounted slides in one pass.
I'm sure there are specialist companies that will do it for a price.

edit: corrected to 54 in one pass. It's 96 in one job.

 

[Aristophanes]

GoPhoto
Scan Cafe

...and others specialize in high-volume scanning of negs and slides.

 

[.... _]

Might be cheaper to buy a projector or a slide duplicator and digital camera to do it with.

 

[ferider]

I have an old Minolta Dimage Multi scanner with a slide feeder, David, and used it once to scan around a thousand slides for a local non-profit. The feeder takes around 50 slides, and it took a couple of days. No ICE, but quite cheap these days on ebay.

 

[lynnb]

Another DIY option is to use a Nikon Coolpix E4500 with Nikon ES-E28 Slide Copy Adaptor. This combination will make reasonable quality 4Mp JPG copies at the rate of one slide every 8-10secs, or a bit faster if you have someone to help with a blower brush and pass the cleaned slides to you. It will also take TIFFs but that takes much longer due to the slow write speed - slower than using a V700 with slide holder.

The E4500 has a high quality macro lens and the slide copy adaptor is specifically made for it. You might be able to pick one up on the popular auction site. I've got both, and used the combination to make quick copies of a family's slide archives. Results were quite acceptable for small prints or web.

 

[dexdog]

Similar to ferider, I used a Minolta scanner with the big slide feeder to scan about 4000 slides for my mother. Set to batch scan and let it go, worked great.

 

[jsrockit]

GoPhoto
Scan Cafe

...and others specialize in high-volume scanning of negs and slides.

How's the quality though?

 

[kanzlr]

never used it, but there is a Reflecta Slide scanner:

http://www.filmscanner.info/ReflectaDigitDia6000.html

 

[mbisc]

never used it, but there is a Reflecta Slide scanner:

http://www.filmscanner.info/ReflectaDigitDia6000.html

Cool how much is that baby?

On the a cheaper note, has anyone ever used one of these ones (or similar):