Like so many of my vintage, I have several thousand slides taken during the 1960s through to the 1980s when this was the preferred method of recording one's photographic memories.
Unfortunately I found later it was a real pain in the bum setting up the projector and screen every time I wanted to show others a slide of something of interest, and even with a small hand held slide viewer it was not much better with only one person at a time able to view the slide in question.
I have always wanted to scan all of my slide collection and save it to DVDs or on my Hard Drive so that I would not only have a backup of them, but it would also be much more convenient to view them. The need to get my slides copied was becoming somewhat urgent, as several years ago I needed to reproduce a single slide as a print and when I scanned it, and I found that on many of my older slides the emulsion had started to clot and crackle making it impossible to get a clear photo, so they were not going to be much use to anyone if I did not do something soon.
Using my flatbed scanner was always so time consuming that I would merely copy one or two particular slides that I wanted at the time and leave it at that, each slide taking about 5 minutes to scan and save. Now, I know that there are newer flatbed scanners with the ability to scan 4 - 6 at a time, but I couldn't justify the cost of changing over merely for a one time job. For the same reason, the dedicated slide scanners that were available were also well beyond my price range.
For some time now I have been watching adverts in various magazines and advertising brochures for small slide and negative scanners that attach directly to your computer via a USB cable. With me being naturally "miserable" when it comes to parting with my hard earned cash, the whole concept just looked too small and cheap to be of any real value, so I decided that for the moment I would limit myself to checking various posts on the Internet to see what if anything was being said about them.
As a result of my nosing about, I found that there were quite a number of similar USB scanners available and that they varied in both price and quality. Whilst talking with a friend about two months ago I mentioned this subject to him and he was also very interested as he was involved in a project where he was scanning many slides for the Local History group. Within days he contacted me to let me know that not only had he had a good look at what was available, but he had been to Adelaide and bought one, and that thus far he was very happy with it.
The model finally selected is not the cheapest scanner available, but I would say that they are probably the best value for money. The unit comes with two different types of holder to scan both slides and negatives, a USB cord and a power supply.
There are several different ways in which it can be used, firstly, if you use the USB cable it is powered by your computer's power supply and the same cable can download your scanned images to the computer, or you can plug in the "plug pack" style power supply and save your images to an SD card similar to that used in many cameras that can be slid into the unit, this SD card is not supplied with the unit when purchased. I find that the latter method is preferable as a 2Gb SD card will hold nearly a thousand images which is plenty to do at a time.
My scanner cost $89 as advertised on the Internet, I paid $15 for a 2Gb SD card and Postage was a further $6, altogether, I think it has been good value for money.
