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On Tue, 20 Oct 2009, Neil Winchurst wrote:
I have been having a sort out at home and have come across a stack of old family photo slides. When I say old, some of them from more than forty years ago. I had forgotten about them. Back in those days the common way to take family photos was by using slide film. So my question, what is the best way to transfer such pictures to my computer? I do not have a scanner, but anyway, I do not think that a scanner copes very well with slides. Perhaps there are specialised types. There are also some colour prints, incidentally, but not many.
I have a slide and negative scanner. It's old though - SCSI! It produces the equivalent of about a 12MP image. Single slide at a time.
The big down-side is that it's slow. Not so much the scanning part which takes about 45 seconds, but the post-processing to correct colours, take out scratches, etc.
I also bought some commercial software to handle it too (shock horror!) I still don't think there's anything to match it, and at the time it was $40 well spent - VueScan. (Which "knows" about the scanner and 100's of types and makes of film so can do 95% of all the corrections in software) Maybe SANE has improved since I first got it (8 years ago), but it was sh*t back then.
I have visions of digitally capturing 1000's of negatives and slides I'd taken over the years - I did a few then got bored and bought a digital camera. It's last big outing was a wedding I did for a friend about 6 years or so ago - I had the digital camera (Nikon CP5000, 5MP), but felt that film was still better at the time and I had more experience with my old SLR. I think that was the last time I used the SLR...
You may be better off & quicker with a slide adapter for a digital camera...
Gordon(Who, like your slides is also more than forty years old and doesn't think that's that old!!!)
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