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I’ve been helping my Dad to sort some stuff out (he’s 94) I’ve found 6 cassettes of 35mm slides from the ‘70s around 700 slides in total. The local quality photography shop wants £2 per slide and a couple of online/mail order firms charge 30p per slide. In either case I’ll have to sort the ones worth saving from the ones that aren’t and clean them before sending for processing
Or I could buy a scanner for about £150 and do the job myself
You seem to be able to solve every problem and offer endless advice in here. WWSTWD
Thanks
Iirc there's a company in Southend that does it at reasonable prices
Try you local Max Spielmann - they are franchises so you may be able to negotiate a quantity discount.
As for scanning them yourself - cheap scanners can be painfully slow and will take you weeks! 😬
Pay an expert and pay them to clean them or you're in for a world of pain. Check the resolution and whether the images come back as jpeg (ready to use but limited flexibility later) or raw (a digital negative that you can have fun with later in a digital lightroom).
Scanning images that means something to you is therapeutic but costs and is time consuming. I've been down both these routes and like the SLR technique.
1:Buy a dust blower, or if the slides are really bad, a slide cleaning kit. Buy a good flatbed scanner with slide scanning features and automatic dust removal. You'll get good results but it will take a few minutes per slide to process them and get to something looking half reasonable.
2: Go all in: buy the cleaning kit, an SLR, macro lens, lightbox, film holder, copy stand, lightroom and negative lightroom pro. This is not cheap. Invest several days figuring out how to get decent results. Spend about 2 minutes per slide getting really good results.
Hand-pick the slides you actually want and then pay someone to do it. Not to be mercenary but 700 slides for a 94-year old, you're probably better off investing in a slide viewer or a projector. (I have an "Agfascope" which is likely as old as those slides, modern versions are £25 on ebay.)
Your £2 vs 30p probably involves actually cleaning up the 50-year old slides first, which is no small task. My local independent photography shop refused it out of hand as it was more trouble than it was worth.
I bought a slide scanner at around that price point. It was mediocre. Assuming I can find it you can have it for a nominal fee if you want to waste your time buggering about with it.
Thank you for all the replies. I should have said I’m in Cumbria
We have a Max Spielman about and hour away I’ll give them them a ring
I don’t mind putting the time in if I can get a decent result, the quality of the originals isn’t great so I have to keep expectations realistic
I’m not willing to invest too much in kit for a one job (can’t believe I’ve said that, I must be old lol) so a DSLR set up is off the cards
Looks like Lords Photography will get the job of if I can cull the slides down to 125 and or agree a discount
There is a projector with them but the faff level is why they haven’t been seen for forty years
They are for my Dad, he has a digital photo frame and we’ll put them on there. Ultimately they are for me as well as there are lots of colour pictures of long lost family members in and among with pictures of a teenage me!
+1 for getting a slide viewer and selecting the best images. I had a Nikon cool scan negative scanner in the early 2000’s before digital slr’s were affordable and spent many hours scanning colour negatives as well as family slides taken in the 60’s and 70’s. To scan and clean up/adjust in Lightroom took probably up to half an hour per image to get a good result. A professional might be able to do it more quickly but even so it’s not a thing to undertake lightly. 30p a slide sounds like a bargain, £2 for a proper job sounds entirely reasonable
I would echo everything said above.
Unless the slides are meaningful to you and you have more than just a passing interest in photography and digital imaging this is not a job you want to take on yourself.
If the interest is there then the process of actually getting good results can be joyful. Frustrating, time consuming, tedious and joyful.
If you have neither interest in the images or imaging in general then you can remove the joyful part from the above.
UPDATE
Sorry for the delay in updating you all, the weather has been too good.
I decided to do it myself and bought a Kodak scanner from Amazon for £140 there was a much better option Plustek 8300 which included a software bundle but £389 was too steep for me for a one off job
The results are ok given that the quality of the originals wasn’t so great and it didn’t take too long, I did 270 slides in a couple of evenings. No editing time in that and I haven’t done any yet
here is an example of 14 year old me, 55 years ago LOL I think the blur is the camera case…
