A slide scanner is a product that will allow you to get all of your slides, negatives and transparencies and turn them into digital files ready to be viewed, printed and shared. A standard slide scanner is roughly the size of a small toaster and it is principally intended to scan mounted or un-mounted slides along with filmstrip in the form of negatives. If you have old 35mm slides to scan it is arguably the best and easiest way to achieve high quality digital images from them.
If you do hold lots of your photos in a film archive it is advised that you transfer them to digital format. There are plenty of benefits to transferring to a digital archive but the primary driver is if you continue to hold images in film then you run the risk of it deteriorating after a long period. Over time most film will degrade slightly resulting in colour loss or damage from dust and dirt. When they are transferred to digital you can make changes to the picture to rectify any damage and give the image a new lease of life. The software that comes with most slide scanners may be able to do this and if not you can always purchase photo editing software.
The other big advantage to digital image storage is the amount of space you can save, especially if you have a very large collection of slides, they may well take up a lot of room. By scanning the slides you can store them on your computer or external hard drive, or even safer you could store them online with cloud computing websites. With a digital archive you will find that the actual archiving will be a lot easier, in the way that you can index and subcategorise your images without having to open dozens of boxes and hold film up to the light.
The way a slide scanner works is by shining a light through your film and recording the emitted light through a sensor, it is this process that will produce a digital image from your film. On most slide scanners you will need to place the mounted slides or filmstrip into a mounting tray, this is then closed and fed into the machine to be passed over the bulb. With this method batch processing is possible and you will be able to process roughly 4/5 slides or film exposures before changing the mount.
When the scanning is complete it will be the job of the software to conduct any post scan editing. On some high end scanners the filters and automatic settings will be applied automatically; for example grain reduction or colour correction. Dust and scratch removal capabilities are a very useful feature but this is often done with the aid of an infra-red bulb while in the scanning phase (which will detect areas that are damaged and tell the software) look out for Digital ICE which is a popular brand found on more expensive models.
It is well worth investing in a scanner that comes with good software as it is this that takes care of a large part of the process. It is the software that will hold certain information like the colour profiles of the film being scanned which in turn will represent an accurate colour match. If software like Vuscan or Silverfast doesn't come bundled then I would highly recommend using a decent photo editing suite like Photoshop.
For more information visit Slide Scanner Review where you will find further guides and tips on Scanning your slides.
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