About thirty-five to forty years ago, 35mm slides were quite popular. Families documented their vacations and special occasions with series of slides, businesses used slide shows for important presentations, and students learned about faraway places and science from slide shows. Each slide was placed, in order and in the correct orientation, into the slide carousel, and the show began.
Image technology has come a long way since the 60’s and 70’s. PowerPoint presentations, digital cameras, and photographs on CD’s and DVD’s are used for displaying pictures and presentations. Many people have boxes and cases full of old 35mm slides that sit gathering dust because viewing the slides is too cumbersome or the slide projector is broken. Fortunately, slides can now be converted to a digital format onto CD’s and DVD’s for easy storage and viewing with slide scanning.
You can use a flatbed scanner or a film scanner to scan your slides. Film scanners can range in price from $300 to over $1,000, but they produce a higher quality reproduction. Some of the scanner features you need to consider before making a purchase are resolution, DPI, PPI, dynamic range, and bit depth.
The resolution of a scanned image is the measurement of how sharp, or clear, the scanned image is. The DPI, or dots per inch, is the measurement of the number of image dots a printer is capable of printing into 2.54cm (one linear inch) of space. A higher DPI typically results in a higher resolution. Pixel, a combination of the words “picture” and “element,” is a term that refers to the smallest unit of an image. This is typically a color dot. The number of pixels a scanner supports (megapixels) and the size of the image produced determine the PPI, or pixels per inch. As the size of an image increases, the PPI decreases. Scanners with higher megapixels produce images with higher resolution. Dynamic range refers to the capability of distinguishing levels of brightness in an image. A low dynamic range results in a blurry, undefined image, and a high dynamic range produces a sharp, crisp image. Bit depth, or color depth, is the measurement of how many bits, or single units of information, are used to create each pixel in a digital image. Higher bit depths result in brighter and deeper image colors.
There are some drawbacks to do-it-yourself slide scanning. As mentioned previously, the cost of a quality scanner may be prohibitive. You may also end up with a scanner that is difficult to operate or does not perform as you expected. Common problems of scanning slides at home or at your business are damage from fingerprints, choosing the appropriate settings on the scanner, and difficulty producing pictures without scratches and other unsightly marks. Slide scanning can also be a very time-consuming.
For an easier approach to scanning slides, try a professional photography business that offers this service. Professional slide scanning services use top of the line scanners, and the scanned images are clear and blemish-free. You won’t need to bother with purchasing special equipment to scan your slides, and reputable scanning services guarantee their work. Your slide scanning project will be completed in no time!
ng>Transfer your 35mm Slides and 35mm Film Negatives to your PC
For those of use that are old enough to use cameras before the “big switch” to digital you’ve no doubt got loads of memories stored away on 35mm Slides and 35mm negatives. Its not unusual for these to languish in boxes in cupboards or under the stairs gathering dust. The promise of course is that “one day” the 35mm slides will come out and be shown at a family gathering on the “big screen” but in reality the slides and negatives tend to stay put because its all just too much trouble, too time consuming and invariably the 35mm slide projector and screen tend to get stored in the loft or garage and its a whole world of pain trying to find and recover them.
Its the same with 35 negatives – once neatly stored with the photographs they relate to but typically over time “stuffed” in a box never to see the light of day again.
Well as technology moves on there now a pretty simple and easy way to breathe new life back into your slides and negatives. USB Slide and Negative scanners allow you to capture your images and store them digitally on your PC and of course from there you can email them to friends and family, post them on facebook, burn them to DVD’s or simply print them out in a size and format that suits.
USB slide scanners are getting better all the time and the latest versions don’t even need to be connected to a computer to be used, Instead they have a built in screen (viewer) and the images can be captured digitally and stored on a memory card (this card can then simply be plugged into your PC or plugged into a card reader connected to your PC and the images transferred onto the computer. Easy!. It really is.
The beauty of the USB Slide and Negative Scanners is that once you have captured your images and stored them on your PC then manipulating the images is easy, saving them for future use is easy and showing them off is a doddle!. With the growth in the use of Digital Photo Frames any old photo can now be displayed/shown off easily.
The Veho FilmScan35 USB Negative & Slide scanner is we believe the best of the bunch in the market at the moment. Its also known as the ION Film2SD – but it is exactly the same product in a different colour and with a different name