[Closed] Best way to digitise slides

I just use a flat bed scanner which has an insert for slides in the lid.

It's a pretty manual process though!

This won't help much I bought a high end slide scanner. But that was real money

I'd look into the newer flat bed scanners with a transparency adaptor

Thinks aloud. I wonder what polarisandy uses?

I've been using an Epson V550 which is a flat bed with a tray and it works really well if a little slow but that seems to be typical of all of the cheaper but good scanners. This it is around 1 min a slide at sensible resolution but you do 4 at a time. If you sort yourself out to be cleaning one set while scanning another set then that helps but it still takes time

I've been incredibly impressed at just how well slides keep their colours and the resolution over time. It's great to see this stuff on a screen now

Note that it's worth doing an experiment on the best resolution before going too far ahead with scanning. I found that it just wasn't worth going up to the highest that the scanner would do as there wasn't that level of detail in the slides and it would have made the files massive and taken forever

Easiest way is to pay someone else to scan them. If its only a couple of hundred slides, then that's probably cheaper than buying a decent scanner.

If you want to do it yourself, I recommend a Plustek Opticfilm slide scanner. Costs about £200, depending on the model. It is good quality, decent resolution etc, though it can be rather slow. And even more time consuming if you want to tweak each image. But if its a nice slide, in good condition, you can get great results.

For software, I recommend Vuescan. I found its a lot nicer and easier to use than the software included with the scanner.

I bought a Canon flatbed scanner. Did all my slides - very boring and tedious - then I sold it as nearly new. Only lost a few quid on it too. Sorted.