Large quantity slide scanning?

[Cameron Knowlton]

Does anyone know of a good solution for scanning thousands of slides? I realize there are batch slide scanners, but those still incur a massive amount of labour to setup, scan, teardown.

Maybe someone knows of a service that offers cheap labour costs?

I have a huge number of slides taken by my Dad; now that he's gone, I'd like to get them digitized, but cannot even conceive of personally spending the time that it would require.

Thanks in advance.

[elkehochban]

I bought my Dad a machine that turns slides into digital at Walmart about a year ago. It wasn't too expensive - under $100 and easy enough for a senior to learn to use. Sorry, but I don't remember the brand.

[Stacey]

There are several companies ie Wal-Mart or Costco that will scan your slides. My mother had some slides slides scanned several years ago. The scanned slides were put on a DVD, with music. I do not think it cost too much. The only problem was the slides were very old, 1960's, and thus the copies were not of great quality. I am now in the process of scanning my Dad's slides at high resolution, using a HP Scanjet G4010. It is going to take a long time to scan all of them. I however, can do any color correction in Lightroom. Just some options for you. Good Luck.

[Charlene]

a lot of the mass scanning services scan at a low quality- you would be best to break it up into pieces- say do so many slides a week- like how many can you do in 1-2 hours & set that as a weekly goal. I have a Cannon flat bed scanner that has an option for film & slides & does a quality job- it's 3 years old now- you'd think they'd come out with better possibly- but personally I'd rather have quality than quantity. I will need to do this with all my dad's slides whenever he finally decides to give them to me...

[BonnieB]

I tried to scan a few years ago, but I could not bear the tedium and repetition of it. So I'm going to pay to have them done.
When I hear of a place that does it, I add it to a little list:

digmypics
www.digmypics.com

Fotobridge
www.fotobridge.com

Larsen Digital
www.larsendigital.com

Scan Cafe
www.scancafe.com

I think I've seen it cost extra to get back RAW as opposed to JPG files.

[Cindy]

I agree with Charlene, My experience with mass scanners at quickie picture places is they just get it done not really looking to see if they turn out well.

[Dave Schofield]

Sorry dude, this is an age old question since the invention of the computer. Best way, if you care about your dad's stuff. sit and do them one at a time. Even if you only do an hour every sunday for the next two years. I find I can scan about 36 frames in about 15 minutes now, using one of those cheap 5mp ones off amazon. when I want bigger scans from the Epson that can take me 1.5 hours for a 36 roll.

[DpsDave]

Getting high quality digital images of slides involves much more than scanning, and scanning yourself is expensive and time consuming.
For more information, here is an article I've written on the subject:
http://dpsdave.hubpages.com/hub/Scanning-photo-prints-and-slides

Here is a price comparison of the top slide scanning companies:
http://www.dpsdave.com/index.html

Hope this helps!
Regards,
Dave Orr
DpsDave.com

[Cameron Knowlton]

thanks, @dpsdave. I'm very familiar with scanners and photo corrections; I used to tech Agfa and Linotype-Hell scanners for a Mac company in Calgary. Some of those scanners were upward to $500k.

I just don't have the time.

Your suggested link for outsourcing scanning is excellent, $0.25/slide is a number I'll have to consider. It's not out of the ballpark.

Thanks so much for the lead.