scanner for mounted 35mm slides?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Joe Sweeney
  • Start date Start date
J

Joe Sweeney

I have a few thousand mounted 35mm slides in Kodak Carousel slide trays. I
no longer have a projector. I want to scan the slides and store them on
CD's.

The film scanners I read about seem to focus on unmounted film. I'd really
appreciate some suggestions of what to look at to do this job.

Thanks for you time... Joe
 
The film scanners I read about seem to focus on unmounted film.
Click to expand...

My Nikon Coolscan IV came with an adapter that accepts one mounted slide.
You push the slide into a slot, scan it, then push a button to pop it back
out. An optional adapter, which I didn't buy, accepts a stack of slides
and can process them automatically in sequence. I assume newer Nikon
models are similar; perhaps they even use the same adapters.

I assume that at least some other manufacturers configure their film
scanners similarly.
 
Joe Sweeney said:
I have a few thousand mounted 35mm slides in Kodak Carousel slide trays. I
no longer have a projector. I want to scan the slides and store them on
CD's.

The film scanners I read about seem to focus on unmounted film. I'd really
appreciate some suggestions of what to look at to do this job.

Thanks for you time... Joe
Click to expand...

Some/most scanners have a film holder for strips of film and a holder for
mounted Slides.

My Dimage Scan Dual IV has holders for 6 frames of film and a holder for 4
mounted 2" square 35mm Slides. The Scan dual4 will focus automatically or
manually on film or slides.


If your slides are Kodachrome, then ICE will not help.

http://www.asf.com/products/ice/FilmICEOverview.shtml
 
Almost all scanners advertised as "slide scanners" will handle both strips
and mounted slides. I've used Minolta (now Konika-Minolta), Nicon, and
Canon. They all handle mounted slides.

Don
 
Charlie said:
And what make you think scanning one slide at a time is "inefficient"?
If I recall correctly, when I made the original exposures, I was only
taking one picture at a time, and I didn't consider that inefficient.
Click to expand...
It wasn't practical for you to take more than one picture at a time. My
father took his slides over a thirty year period, but I certainly hope
to scan them in a smaller time frame than that. Being able to load more
than one at a time into my scanner is certainly more efficient than having
to do each one individually -- if my scanner could take a carousel
instead, and do the same quality of scanning, that would make life much
easier for me. It's a pity it can't.
 
While it's true that all scanners can scan mounted slides, only 2 can
do it with any efficiency:
1. Nikon LS5000-has attachment for about 50 slides at a crack, ~$1600
for everything.
2. Pacific Imaging scanner and clones thereof that supposedly takes
carousels as well as stacks of slides, AND supposedly scans slides in
vertical or horizontal orientation. However, one poster here said it
didn't work with carousels. Reviews on this machine have not been
good. However, you can't beat the price, ~$650. Now if Nikon or
Minolta would just make a machine with these specs!!!

Ed Lusby
 
While it's true that all scanners can scan mounted slides, only 2 can
do it with any efficiency:
1. Nikon LS5000-has attachment for about 50 slides at a crack, ~$1600
for everything.
2. Pacific Imaging scanner and clones thereof that supposedly takes
carousels as well as stacks of slides, AND supposedly scans slides in
vertical or horizontal orientation. However, one poster here said it
didn't work with carousels. Reviews on this machine have not been
good. However, you can't beat the price, ~$650. Now if Nikon or
Minolta would just make a machine with these specs!!!

Ed Lusby
Click to expand...

What specs? Lousy scan quality? Why trade off quality for ability to
san lots of slides automatically and cheaply?

My Nikon LS IV handles one slide at a time and does a damn fine job of
it, and I'm sure you can get one used for much less than the $650
price that you seem to like so much.

And what make you think scanning one slide at a time is "inefficient"?
If I recall correctly, when I made the original exposures, I was only
taking one picture at a time, and I didn't consider that inefficient.

Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/
 
If you knew anything about scanning a lot of slides, you'd appreciate
a scanner that would take a carousel tray of slides directly and scan
them in any orientation. Taking slides in and out of carousels takes
half the total time of the scanning project. What a dolt. You'd take
twenty years to scan thousands of slides with your Nikon IV. Even the
Nikon LS5000 is really not a good workflow, unless you are presented
with a stack of slides all in the same horizontal orientation.
Ed
 
Quickist thing I've found, other than a feeder, is to use extension
tubes on a digital camera, set to macro mode. Bang, bang, bang, as quick
as you can feed them, and it's dirt cheap. On the other hand I don't
mind feeding one slide at a time into my Epson 2580. Fix em up and move
on. About one a minute.
 
While it's true that all scanners can scan mounted slides, only 2 can
do it with any efficiency:
1. Nikon LS5000-has attachment for about 50 slides at a crack, ~$1600
for everything.
2. Pacific Imaging scanner and clones thereof that supposedly takes
carousels as well as stacks of slides, AND supposedly scans slides in
vertical or horizontal orientation. However, one poster here said it
didn't work with carousels. Reviews on this machine have not been
good. However, you can't beat the price, ~$650. Now if Nikon or
Minolta would just make a machine with these specs!!!

Ed Lusby
Click to expand...

The Pacific Imaging scanner does use round trays which they call "carousels",
but these are not the same as or compatible with the standard Kodak Carousel
trays. I think they're the 100-slide "ferris wheel" type for certain projectors
(mostly no longer manufactured) that push the slides in and pull them out
horizontally.

The auto feeder attachment for the Nikon LS5000 (and the earlier version for
the LS4000) has some well-known problems with jamming until you modify the
opening where the slide goes in, but once I got mine fixed, it only jammed when
the slide going in snagged on the next one in the stack. I scanned 40,000
slides in about 3 months by keeping the thing fed pretty steadily. (That did
not include any cleaning of the slides, so my old Kodachromes need a lot of
spotting to actually use the scans--sometimes it's easier to rescan one than
to clean it up. But for archiving and easy lookup, it was still worth doing.)
 
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