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jazz1

Contributor
Original poster
Aug 19, 2002
4,424
18,080
Mid-West USA
I’ve got a ton of old 35mm photo slides. I check out Amazon and looked at several reviews of dedicated scanners (not a flatbed scanner please).

What I found are several Kodak and Kodak slide scanner spin-offs. Many reviews seemed to criticize the ancient software that comes with them, and also outright non-compatible OS reports.

Can anyone recommend scammers that are fully compatible with Mac OS? Last Imchecked it was pretty expensive to have slides scanned by outsourcing the work.
 

Ben J.

macrumors 6502a
Aug 29, 2019
653
349
Oslo
I have a plustek opticfilm 8100. It's OK, but it's very slow to scan, and manual work, changing film and slides, mousing around in the software etc. And yes, the software is a bit nineties/windowsy, but it works here on Ventura. I could buy a 3rd party software (silverfast) which looks better and is supposed to be faster, but it's expensive.

I digitized my main slide collection over a decade ago. 3000+ 35mm slides in carousels and racks. I projected the images on white cardboard and photographed them. With some trial and error it worked out very nicely. More than enough quality for me. They can be printed to A3 size just fine.

I put the projector, camera and A2 cardboard in a room next to my office, with no windows. I placed the camera lens just above the projector lens, so skewing wasn't a problem. I might have used a ring on the lens to allow for closer focus, as the distance was less than two meters.

Then I made a hole in the wall so I could have cables to control both the camera and the projector from my desktop. Click next frame on projector, image from the camera comes up on screen, adjust exposure etc if needed. Expose, next frame. Superfast compared to scanning. This is the way to do it if you want to digitize lots of slides.

These days I'm rummaging thru bags and boxes of negatives, rejects, rolls of film that was never mounted or used, and I'm digging up gold from up to 50yrs ago, and this is where the Plustek comes in handy. Of course, I dismantled that projector room setup long ago.

It's so great to have most of my stuff digitized, I also have lots of old prints from family albums. I have great success with printing and framing old stuff for gifts and such, creating DVDs, posting on FB if you're into that.

That's roughly what I know about the subject. Good luck.
 
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puttputt

macrumors regular
Sep 12, 2006
153
48
Michigan
Find a Nikon Coolscan 5000. I run a non-Nikon software (VueScan) on a slightly older Mac (I'm not certain you can run on Sonoma). It is unfortunate that Nikon stopped making these. Used ones are worth as much as they cost new. That tells you something: the quality is tremendous. The scans I did (only several thousand) were superb.
 
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