Question For You Photographers

I'm a retired photojournalist. You don't want to go cheap. Look for a good camera shop near you and have them converted professionally.

You don't want to go cheap. Look for a good camera shop near you and have them converted professionally.

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Take this a gospel.
The other option you have is to buy a slide scanner and scan them yourself. I've done both, and from a quality standpoint, prefer my own work.

IF you do it yourself, a good scanner is a HP Scanjet 4890, that has the fixtures for slides and negatives. This is an older model, they can be found on ebay.

Definitely get a professional. I had two racks of slides digitized and then placed on a CD and I was really impressed with the ease and quality.

Scanning direct from the slide will always give the best quality. I don't know the cost of photographic kit, services or a scanner in the US but I suspect that it is cheaper than in the UK. If you are really pushed to keep the cost down and have a digital SLR, get some extension tubes for the lens, a good diffuse light source (preferably dayight balanced), tripod and copy them. The quality will not be as good - loss of resolution, flattening of contrast and reduced colour saturation, but it will work. Mask off any light spill from the light source with black card and test the exposure as by using extension tubes you will effectively be altering the f-stop of the lens.

+1 Pappy

Slide scanner. The question was what was the least expensive way, not the best. If you buy a decent scanner and do it right and know what you are doing, you can easily equal the quality of slides. I prefer to have control over such things rather than farm it out to some store.

A high quality scanner will work fine. 500 slides shouldn't be all that expensive if you have a quality outfit do it. Staples offers this service. If the price is right and you have one in town, have them do a couple and see what you think.

Pay someone to scan them. You''ll get much better results, much faster.

Do a little homework, maybe send a sample batch of slides out to several vendors before committing all 500.

Having them scanned is the simplest way. If you're ocd and have access to a high megapixel camera you can simple photograph the negatives and use software to correct the image.

Im going to have to vote for doing it yourself. A decent flatbed will scan your slides just fine for personal use. There is a time cost so I'm not going to say its cheap. However, pro scanning is not cheap either. Slides are usually an upcharge as well. Pick up an Epson V600. It will deliver excellent results, is fairly inexpensive, and you can use it for other things as well as it is not only a slide scanner. I have printed up to 20x30 with scans from mine. Bear in mind that pro scanning on pro machines can cost up to $4 PER SLIDE. Even if you get it at $1 a slide that's $500.
Once you are set up it doesn't take too long either. The scanner will scan multiples at a time and save them as separate files. So if you take your time and do 10 or 20 a night you'll get it done.

You didn't say but if the 500 slides happen to be old Kodachrome then they probably have yellowed. Scanning them yourself will allow you to remove the yellow varnish, scratches, etc from the images with digital software.

If you go to the expense of buying a flatbed scanner make sure you buy one capable of scanning transparencies or film. These will have a light source in the top cover that will project down through the film or slide.
Yes, monetary cost of buying a scanner and doing it yourself will be less expensive. When I was a magazine editor, I had one at my disposal and would usually find myself doing the scans instead of the art department. They graphic designers could make the scans, but they often didn't bother to do the simple things to get it done right.
Another thing you have to look at is how long it is going to take you to scan all your slides. If you work fast and efficiently - and take into account how fast the scanner does it's thing - it could take 2 or 3 minutes or longer to scan a single slide. That would be approximately 24 hours worth of work. If you've never done it before, then it will take longer.
You also have to ask yourself if you are really better doing something for the first time than someone who has been trained and paid to do the job.

The scanner will scan multiples at a time

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Not what you want to do. Quality scans are done one at a time.
I have a good scanner (Nikon LS-5000) that was top of the line back in it's day. It is still capable of phenomenal scan quality. But in order to get those quality scans, you have to know what you are doing and it takes time. I don't use it anymore. It's possible that one of the newer consumer-grade film scanners is capable of better quality, I don't know. There's a wide gulf now in the pricing between consumer-grade scanners and professional ones, with nothing in-between. I haven't kept up with the market.
But it comes down to two or three things: What is your concept of quality? What is your time worth? If what you want to do is display the slides on a monitor of projector, then a flatbed scanner and a few hours of your time will do the job just fine. If you want scans that are a true and accurate rendition of the originals, and you can afford to have them scanned professionally on pro-quality equipment, then that is the way to go. If you want top-notch scans, but don't want to pay for them, then you can buy a consumer-grade scanner and teach yourself how to use it, but chances are that unless you are willing to devote a good bit of time to the project, you will never scan all of those slides. So take the cost of the scanner and software, plus whatever your time is worth to you and divide it by the number of scans that you'll actually make and decide which is best for you.
Here's the B&H selection of film scanners.I have no experience with any of them.
EDIT: Pappymac and I are on the same channel here.

Yes, John, I have no idea as to the quality of those scanners. What I do see is that production (pro quality) scanners are very expensive, and the rest are consumer-grade. I do need to make some very high quality scans of some of my old work, so I'll be looking for a company to do it for me.

If I only had a small amount of slides (500 is a small number to me. I had thousands to digitize a few years ago.) I'd have them done professionally if the slides are treasured or the results used for enlargements. If the files are going to viewed only on the usual consumer's monitor or, simply shared via email or text, a quality home unit should be fine. Learn the software, check the temperature of the light source fairly often, and invest the time.
My position is, I want the highest quality and am willing to pay for such.
It all depends on the value of the transparencies and what may be done with the new files.

Quality is relative to your intent. If you were selling these professionally or had a corporate client looking for a mural size print for an office or something then yeah, of course, you are going to scan at the highest quality possible. And pay for it.
If this is to get a pic of Uncle Joe at the beach for Facebook then no, no reason to spend a ton.