[Douglashh]

I'm purchasing a scanner with a slide scanning attachment so that I can scan a bunch of old 35MM family slide. The goal is to preserve them in digital form. No plan to print any of them, well maybe a couple of 4x6's.

The store sales person kept telling me to get the highest resolution machine possible, in this case an Epson 4180 that can scan 4800 by 9600. Then I read a report from someone who said it took 90 minutes to scan 4 slides at that resolution. I have about 600 slides. I called Epson and they essentially said it was stupid to scan at that high a resolution. They said I should scan the slides at 600 maximum and that 300 would probably be just fine.

Once scanned I want to burn them to a CD or DVD for slide shows on the computer or possibly a plasma TV down the road.

Can someone educate me a little or point me to a source of information on slide scanning?

Thanks,
Doug

[chris v]

You are never going to get the results with a flatbed slide attachment that you'd get with a dedicated Nicon slide scanner. One of the main problems is focus. The slide mounts hold the slide up off of the focal plane of the glass.

You really need one of these at least:

http://nikonimaging.com/global/produ...er/coolscan_5/

Mine will do a 4000 DPI scan in a couple of minutes.

[OldCodger73]

Doug,unless you actually need a flat bed scanner or money is an issue, I agree with Chris-- go with a dedicated slide scanner. The Nikon Coolscan V, with a street price somewhere in the mid $500s would be an excellent choice. The results will be so much better.

I faced the same dilemma that you have. I have almost 30 years of slides and wanted to go through and digitize a good number of them to archive, make prints, and/or turn into sound slide shows. Even though I had an Epson flatbed that had a transparency attachment that gave usuable results, I decided to go with the Nikon Coolscan V. The results are stunning.

The slides scan at 4000 dpi in about two minutes using the ICE correction and take about another minute to save through USB2. The raw scans are about 120MB in TIFF format. I then open the saved image in Photoshop and size it and change the dpi setting to whatever size I'm planning on using.

Whatever route you plan on going it's going to be a project that takes some time to complete.

Good luck.