28 December 2010

Tech Tuesday - Scanning Slides

This was part of one of the best presents I ever received:

Grandma Smith and Me January 1968
One of my biggest goals for 2011 is scanning, archiving and sharing with my cousins the thousands of slides taken by Bubba. My husband even gave me the Slides 2 PC scanner from ION. Disappointingly and despite MJ's best effort, the scanner did not scan. Hello? It's going back to the store. I have been researching slide scanners for the last month and have not found one with good reviews and a reasonable price. 

Enter my sister with her thoughtful gift. She went through the slides, pulled out 250 and sent them away to be scanned. She gave me an adorable mug with a collage of some of the precious pictures of the two of us from our much younger days.

As if the mug wasn't a great gift all by itself, my sister then gave me copies of the digital files of all of the slides. I jumped up and did the happy dance! Many of these pictures I had never even seen before. It seems that our Bubba was such a prolific photographer, that he couldn't print them all and just printed his favorites. 

I still plan to work on trying to do some of the scanning myself with the Epson scanner I already own. It has a slide scanner apparatus, but I haven't been successful in using it yet. Back to the drawing board on that one. My sister has given me renewed motivation to get this job done. She uncovered many previously unseen treasures and there are many, many more to find. 

Happy treasure hunting!

Scrappy Gen

5 comments:

  1. Wow, your slides are in great shape. I have a slide scanner, but the images are so deteriorated it is sad. I see lots of information out there on preserving photographs, but very little on preserving slides. I think after I finish scanning they will be ready to be trashed.

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  2. Heather, What slide scanner are you using? I would love to know how you like it. The scans my sister scanned were mostly from 1968 through 1974 and yes they are in great shape. My grandfather kept them in their original boxes, which haven't really yellowed or deteriorated so they must have been somewhat archival. There are slides that are a lot older that I believe are in worse condition. We are also trying to decide what we will do with the slides after we have scanned them. Our thinking at this point is to give them to the respective family units who are in the pictures. There are just so many.

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  3. About a year ago, I purchased a designated 35 mm slide scanner at Walmart for about $80. It was a 21C Digital Film and Slide Converter; model WM-FC-VP. Compatible with Win XP & Vista. It worked great. Then my HP laptop of 3 years crashed in Sep 2010. I was obligated to get Win 7 on a new laptop. HOWEVER, I discovered the slide scanner was not compatible with Win 7, because, as I was told, Win 7 is 64 bit and other Win versions are 32 bit. I was offered a replacement scanner at a discount after contacting manufacturer at www.vupointsolutions(dot)com. However, I had to pack up old scanner and mail it to Vupoint. That was 3 months ago and I don't know if offer is still good. I will probably just order a new scanner from their web site.

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  4. I received an Epson 8800 scanner for Christmas which has excellent reviews for scanning slides & negatives. I need to clean off a corner of my desk to set it up so haven't used it yet.

    My father is a photographer and I have nabbed hundreds of slides from him. We spoke about the quality of the slides and he stated to me that any slide that used Kodachrome will last eons but anything using Ektachrome will deteriorate substantially in just a decade or so. Just a bit of FYI.

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  5. Woo Hoo, Thank you for the info about Kodachrome vs Ektachrome. Let me know how it goes with your new scanner.

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