Old colour slides

[Sarunas Burdulis]

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Neil Winchurst wrote:
> I have been having a sort out at home and have come across a stack of
> old family photo slides. When I say old, some of them from more than
> forty years ago.
> 
> I had forgotten about them. Back in those days the common way to take
> family photos was by using slide film.
> 
> So my question, what is the best way to transfer such pictures to my
> computer? I do not have a scanner, but anyway, I do not think that a
> scanner copes very well with slides. Perhaps there are specialised types.
> ...

The best way would be to scan them using a *film* scanner (either by
yourself or using a scanning service).

I tried Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED. Hardware is decent, though
scanning is still very slow, especially if options like scratch
"removal" etc. are enabled. I found the speed impractical for the amount
of film I had to scan. The software is Mac/Win only and isn't convenient
to say the least. I didn't find any way to use the scanner with Linux
and free/open source software. Finally I resorted to sending the
negatives and slides in batches to two scanning services. You can test a
scanning service by first sending/giving them a smaller batch of slides...

- --
Sarunas Burdulis
Systems Administrator
Department of Mathematics, Dartmouth College
http://math.dartmouth.edu/~sarunas
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