Do You Need a Dedicated 35mm Slide Scanner?

While Flatbed scanners do an excellent job of reproducing documents, they tend not to do as well when it comes to 35mm slides even if you have an adapter. That is where a dedicated 35mm Slide Scanner comes into the picture, so to speak. The scanner is usually a rectangular device about 4" wide by 10" tall by 15" long. It will usually scan 35mm slides as well as scan film strips. Some are automated but most you have to feed your slides in one at a time. Snap the slide into the scanner receptacle and press a button and the slide scanner will perform a scan of your slide. Many of the under $1000 35mm Slide Scanners will only scan what is considered now as a "normal" slide film size of 1.375" x .875". The cardboard film holder is usually 2" x 2".

Can you do it yourself?

If you think you are going to be able to get decent scans of your slides with a 35mm Slide Scanner under $1000, you are going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. Make sure you are able to return the 35mm Slide Scanner when you see how disappointing the results are. Especially check out the darker shadow areas and see how you will lose an awful lot of details. If you are not fussy about details, then I guess the cheaper 35mm Slide Scanner may work for you. If you do like to see all the details in your photos, maybe you should use a 35mm Slide service bureau.

 There is also the question of whether you want to spend all the time necessary to do this job. Using even a very good Slide Scanner you will be lucky to scan more than one slide per 2-3 minutes at high resolution. That's 3.5 hours, minimum, to scan 100 slides. And that doesn't include Photoshop tweaking and slideshow creation. Don't you have something better to do with your time? This is not a fun job.

Free 35mm To DVD Slide Show Sample Scan And Slide Show Disk.

Our recommended provider of 35mm slides to DVD slide show scanning service will do a FREE sample scan of 10 of your 35mm slides and photos. They will also combine them into a DVD playable slide show so that you can see what your final results will look like. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain  by trying their service.