I bought some equipment allowing the easy (relatively) copying of slides. If you have a Nikon DSLR with an APS-C size sensor and have the Nikkor 35mm DX lens, then you don't need too much more. You need the Nikon ES-1 slide copier and a set of Kenko extension tubes for Nikon. You only need the 20mm extension tube but they are sold in a set of three.

I found that using an off camera flash ensures constant exposure control, so if you have a Nikon speed light you'll need the remote flash cable too.

Anyway, once you get it all set up you just slip an old slide in the copier and photograph it. It's faster than any scanning system and if you have a lot of slides you want to digitize then it is by far and away the cheapest way to do it.

I posted some digitized Kodachromes in the photo album section.

Wish I had your equipment Wink. I bought a simple scanner that works great on my BW negs, but reverses the color on my slides, and the software is not compatible with my iMac.

I think the simplest thing is to have it done. That said my Grandaughter gave me an SVP FS1700 scanner several years ago for slides.It was inexpensive and does an excellent job of digitizing 35mm slides. Also has transport strips for negatives. Works well with my Laptop and uses SD cards. Not the fastest way in the world but accurate and inexpensive.

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Originally posted by zimbabwe:
I think the simplest thing is to have it done. That said my Grandaughter gave me an SVP FS1700 scanner several years ago for slides.It was inexpensive and does an excellent job of digitizing 35mm slides. Also has transport strips for negatives. Works well with my Laptop and uses SD cards. Not the fastest way in the world but accurate and inexpensive.

I looked into having it done commercially, but the prices for any of the high resolution scans are just too prohibitive. When I use my camera I have a 16MP RAW file that I can manipulate all I want in post-processing software, something you can't do with as many options with lo-res jpg files.

But I have thousands of slides so in the end my little system will probably work out for me.

Several flatbed scanners can be used for scanning somewhere around 10 slides at a time. I have an older Epson perfection V700 photo scanner (flatbed), but don't use the scanning software provided with the scanner. Instead I use VueScan Pro (costs around $49.00 for the pro version), and then post process the images with CS5 or CS6. Such scanners allow for scanning large format film, slides, prints at high resolution (6,400 dpi resolution), or documents.

If you have enough slides to justify the purchase, a dedicated slide scanner is the way to go, in my opinion.

I have a Minolta Dimage 5400II that I used do digitize all my slides into JPG or TIFF files and I have been very please with the results.