I HAVE MANY OLD SLIDES FROM MY FAMILY,WHAT IS A GOOD 35MM SLIDE SCANNER THAT CAN BE USE WITH MY MACBOOK PRO?

Question

Hi,
Can anyone recommend a scanner or other device for old family slides that must converted in a digital format  and saved in a DVD and external hard drive?
Thanks
Wandafromqc

Answer 1

Don't even think about scanning thousands of slides yourself. If you have 5000 family slides, it's overwhelmingly likely that just 500 of them will give a highly effective representation of the whole collection, and will include not only all of the best ones but many of the second-best ones too. Scanning them all, or even half of them, will consume your entire summer and would probably give you and your sibs a lot more pictures than any of you really wants to keep.
It used to be true that scanning slides halfway decently required an expensive dedicated film scanner -- consumer flatbed scanners just weren't up to the task. That's no longer true. I have an under-$200 Epson Perfection V500 Photo flatbed scanner that outperforms the $2000+ Nikon film scanner I've had for 9 years in slide and negative scanning, and the software that came with it enables me to scan several (6 if I remember right) slides at once and automatically saves them as separate image files. That makes it much faster to use than the film scanner, and of course I can also use it for scanning flat reflective material, such as the more than 1000 old photographic prints and post cards I've digitized for my local historical society. The film scanner couldn't have done any of that.