How To Convert Slides To Digital Pictures or DVD

Most photographers who have photographs dating back more than 10 years will have accumulated hundreds or even thousands of photographs in now out-moded analog formats. Whilst analog was a good format in it's day, it is an impractical format in which to keep your slides now.

Unless you have stored your slides in archival quality conditions, they will likely already have substantially deteriorated. This is especially true if they were produced cheaply by drug store style photo developing services. If the slides are very old, then some of your most prized photographs or most precious memories may already be nearly unsalvageable. Furthermore, keeping your slides in analog format makes it impossible to email or burn them to DVD, very difficult to show to friends and family (who wants to try using some old projector that may or may not work?) and guarantees further deterioration of your slides.

Fortunately, it is now easy and cheap to scan your slides and, if done properly, the resulting image will often actually be of higher quality than the original itself -- in some cases it will even look better than the original did when it was first taken!

How To Scan My Slides?

There are two main options to scan your slides: one option is to send them to a professional photo scanning service, and the other is to scan them yourself. There are benefits and drawbacks to both options, but in our opinion using a photo scanning service is the best option for pretty much everybody.

Why? Well, let's compare the two choices: if you want to scan your own slides, you're going to have to shell out somewhere around $150 for a decent photo scanner, and you could easily spend over 2 thousand dollars on a top-of-the-range professional photo scanner for each format that you want to scan (35mm slide, film and prints!) You might well already have a good photo editing program on your computer, in which case the equation looks a bit different for you, but most people are probably going to need to spend anywhere from $99 for a basic photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 to as much as $699 for Adobe Photoshop CS4. Yes, the photo editing program you use is very important; your slides will need retouching.

Ok, so in this scenario you're probably going to be spending (at least) $250. Now, you have to scan your slides. It will likely take you about 5 minutes to scan, retouch and save your slides. It could take you longer - much longer, maybe - if the photo is badly damaged, your computer is slow, you're not the best at using Photoshop, etc. At 5 minutes a scan, you can scan 12 slides an hour -- so you have an opportunity cost (the amount of money you lose by not working in that time) of your hourly wage divided by 12. So, how much is your time worth? Assuming you work at the federal rate of minimum wage, $7.25. So, what's 7.25 divided by 12? ... $0.60! Compared to $0.29 per photo at ScanCafe! Quite a bit cheaper, even without the cost of the scanner you'd have to buy. And this is working minimum wage!

Now, some people will have nothing else they could do be doing in that time, and some people may actually even enjoy it (though I doubt it - it gets boring quite quickly), but I think for most people using a photo scanning service is the better option. Even assuming you value your time at nil (you have no employment prospects, say), scanning your own slides still often works out more expensive. Using $250 as the example price point, you'd have to scan 862 slides by yourself just to break even on the initial investment. And that's assuming you wanted to keep all of them: ScanCafe (we can't speak for other services -- we're not aware of any that offer this option, though there may be some) lets you not pay for up to 50% of the scans if you decide not to keep them.

Probably the best reason not to use a photo scanning service is the (small) risk that the slides will get lost. The good scanning services use a professional courier, who scan the parcel at every stage, so it shouldn't get lost, but it does still happen occasionally. If some of your slides are absolutely irreplaceable, then consider scanning them locally and scanning the rest professionally. If your slides are valuable, but not completely irreplaceable, you could consider simply splitting them into batches to lower the risk of total loss. Whatever you do, however, don't let fear stop you from scanning your slides! If you do that, you guarantee their loss!

Alternatives

There are a few other ways to digitize your old photographs, though we wouldn't recommend them unless you only need to scan a few slides. For prints, a normal flatbed scanner will often produce acceptable results. For negatives, there aren't really any alternatives, but there are a wealth of options for slides -- though, none of them are actually very good. Note that, in general, scanning negatives provide the best quality, slides the second best and print the worst. This isn't always true, but it is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Slide holders exist which can be used to convert slides to digital using a normal flatbed scanner - the quality of the pictures produced by this method seems to be quite poor, but it may be a cost-effective method. Another method is a slide holder for a dSLR -- the images that this method produces seem to be similarly uninspiring, and the device is difficult to track down. Finally, some people have used a lightbox, a tripod and a dSLR to take slides of their slide! The images produced by this method seem not to actually be too bad, but it is almost impossible to prevent them being rotated a little bit, which will require correction in post, degrading the quality of the image, and it necessitates you already possess all that equipment. If you happen to already have the requisite equipment and only want to digitize a few slides, this may be an option worth considering.

Enough Talk, I Want To Scan My Photos Already!

If you've decided to scan your own slides (we don't recommend it, see above), then in our opinion the best scanner on the market for this purpose is the Epson Perfection 4490, on sale for $150:

The Epsion Perfection 4490 is capable of scanning 35mm film negatives, slides, transparencies and prints. Whilst the quality is not perfect, it is reasonable, especially for the price point.

Another option is the Canon CanoScan 8800f, on sale for $165:

The main advantage of the CanoScan is that it has the ability to scan 4 slides and 12 35mm film negatives at once! This isn't actually a big an advantage, though -- much of the time is in retouching, anyway, and the important parameter is the scanning time per slide/negative, and that is unaffected. Still, it is a nice feature.

Finally, our recommended option is to use a photo scanning service. It's often cheaper even if you don't value your time at all, and always cheaper if you value your time at more than half minimum wage. There are a few services out there, but if you're in the US or Canada (they do allow international shipping, but you're probably better off going with a local service) we would recommend ScanCafe. They have a good reputation for quality, offer services at a fair price point ($0.29 per photo) and whilst you probably can find cheaper services, we doubt that it's worth it (what corners are they cutting to offer a lower price? A lot of them, judging by some reviews.)

The main reason not to use ScanCafe is the time it takes for them to scan your slides - 4 weeks (to be posted online) and 6 weeks (to receive the DVD they send you!) Now, you're slides have probably been lying around for several times 4-6 years (at least!), so weeks may not matter that much, but if you want a quicker service you'd be well advised to investigate ScanDigital. Whilst ScanCafe has a price advantage (and arguably a quality advantage), you should be happy with either of them. There is a nice review of both services from Macworld here.