Slide Scanner recommendations
Discussion
Not exactly, but just based on my experience you get what you pay for. I bought a Maplin slide scanner for about £20, it comes with some software and adapters to load 4x 35mm slides or a strip of 6x 35mm negatives, software handles inverting the colours for B&W or Colour negs. All is fine with it, except that on random occasions it will stop responding, so you have unplug from USB and plug in again. And it only seems to work on XP without any service packs, though I haven't yet tried it on 7.
For me it does the job - I haven't got that many slides, and they're not incredible quality. This scanner is basically a webcam and an opaque light source combined into one box, so nothing incredible. If the slides you're scanning are very good quality and you need to retain that, then you might want to look at some of the Nikon slide scanners, or (depending on volume) a commercial scanning service. On another forum I read a discussion about how the top end ones do multiple passes to achieve better quality, and some have auto-feeders if you have many slides to do.
PC World do similar scanners to the one I bought, I think they also do one that scans directly to SD card so you don't even need a PC, but at £80-odd I didn't think it was worth the extra.
ETA: don't forget, if you've got any old slides that show cars that are now old (think street scenes, holiday snaps with car parks in them) there's a thread in the Classic Cars area that will much appreciate them: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
For me it does the job - I haven't got that many slides, and they're not incredible quality. This scanner is basically a webcam and an opaque light source combined into one box, so nothing incredible. If the slides you're scanning are very good quality and you need to retain that, then you might want to look at some of the Nikon slide scanners, or (depending on volume) a commercial scanning service. On another forum I read a discussion about how the top end ones do multiple passes to achieve better quality, and some have auto-feeders if you have many slides to do.
PC World do similar scanners to the one I bought, I think they also do one that scans directly to SD card so you don't even need a PC, but at £80-odd I didn't think it was worth the extra.
ETA: don't forget, if you've got any old slides that show cars that are now old (think street scenes, holiday snaps with car parks in them) there's a thread in the Classic Cars area that will much appreciate them: http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
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