Just got back from 2 years of travelling and am looking for a slide scaner to invest in. I've got hundreds of slides that I want to upload to computer as it would be too expensive to print them all out.
I am looking for a decent quality, high speed slide scanner but have no idea where to start and was hoping someone might be able to give me a recommendation. My budget is up to £500.
Many thanks for your advice :-)
globe_traverser
1
lan
First, a warning; high resolution slide scanning places demands on the computer that you're unlikely to face in normal use. 1Gb RAM would be a suggested minimum, more would help, a fast processor and lots of free disk space would also help...
That out of the way, the Nikon Coolscan V ED is probably one of the best items in your budget range, although if you could stretch to the SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED (679GBP) then you'll cut your scanning times to a third...
The Nikon's are excellent scanners, but the software could be better. The auto-slide feeder is a bit flaky too, mine tends to jam, and rarely loads slides in straight. You're better off saving yourself several hundred pounds and loading them one at a time.
2
drdavidknibb
I've used a Minolta Dimage Scan Multi 2 (needs a SCSI board). It has an auto feed holding upto 50 slides - and in the 10000 or so I've scanned has only jammed about 5 times.
No longer in production - but they're on e-bay fairly often.
If you don't like the s/w - as noted by #1 - then get the 3rd party s/w called 'VueScan' - excellent and cheap.
On better still use Linux - which is free and has the free scanner s/w called SANE - which is also pretty good. But check first it supports whatever scanner you finally use.
David
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