I Have close to 900 35mm slides that need to be scanned and converted to a digital format for my Mac I would prefer .jpg’s but any digital format will work . How can I go about accomplishing this?
I currently have a Brother MFC420 / flat bed scanner but I am not sure it is the right tool for the job.
I currently have a Brother MFC420 / flat bed scanner but I am not sure it is the right tool for the job.
A: Scanning slides with a flatbed scanner is not an efficient way to convert them to digitals. There are 35mm slide scanners available that will actually backlight the slide before capturing the image. This way each slide is converted and the images will have better lighting. If you have 900 slides to convert it is going to take you a very long time to get through all of them. Alternatively you might consider using a service. If however you want to have the ability to scan slides as needed, a home model is a perfect solution.
They make slide scanners specifically for that…or an adapter for your existing scanner, which don’t work as well. Try looking on a photography supply web site…ie. camera world
yah either buy an adapter for your scanner, buy a new scanner with an adapter, or buy a slide scanner…. of course, the latter would be more convenient and give you better quality scans.
These are not cheap but there are quite a few around these days
try this ink and all the best. Just to let you know the actual scanning process takes an age so I don Fancy being you doing 900,
You are not going to build an adapter or anything to use with your existing flat bed scanner. It does not have the resolution you need for slides. I do not have a mac, but I do have a bunch of slides which I wanted to scan in. My son bought me a specialized slide scanner with a resolution of 7200 dots per inch for this past Christmas, and he paid a pretty penny for it too! However, if you expect to enlarge the slides to a decent size, a slide can easily be enlarged to an 8×10 and retain excellent quality, you NEED the higher resolution the dedicated slide scanner provides. Otherwise you will be sadly disappointed withthe results. As a minimum, I would suggest at least 3600 dpi as a starting point and then let your budget decide how much higher resolution you can afford. I suggest searching Ebay, mainly because, after scanning slides, most people continue with digital and have no further use for what was an expensive piece of specialized equipment and reselling it can recover some of the cost. And, you can sometimes find a really great deal if you are patient. That is how my son got the one he did for me, started easly and waited and found a sweet deal on Ebay for a new one, at a discounted price with a “buy it now” option which was about 70% of retail, and since it was out of state, no sales tax, but there was a small cost for shipping. Believe me when I say that you need the higher resolution that a dedicated slide scanner provides. What is your flat bed scanner, 1200 dpi? My dedicated scanner is 6 times better…which means my enlargement, 6 times bigger than yours, will look equally as good as yours, but be 6 times larger.