scanning slides

<p>Can anyone recommend a reliable U.K. company that will digitise a large number of colour slides at a reasonable price ?</p>

<p>You need to say what you want to do with the scans and what size the slides are. Its is easier and cheaper to have 35mm slides scanned at a standard good enough for a computer screen or website than it is to scan medium format slides to make very large prints or to act as an archive.</p>

<p>I'm talking about old family photos on 35mm slides, digitising for screen use is fine.</p>

<p>In which case you'll find a fair number of people offering a film scanner service for 20p per slide and up. I've looked at a few of these following a simple google search and I'd suggest you think about the following when making your decision.</p>

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<li>Some (Mr Scan is one) offers a "try before you buy" service and I'd suggest you use this. No point finding out that the colours aren't as you want them after you've taken delivery of hundreds or thousands of scans.</li>

<li>Few of these people will want to remove mounts before scanning or replace then after. So most scan in the mount which means that you'll lose a small proportion of the frame. Its pretty easy to get scans from mounted slides or from strips of unmounted slides. Fewer people want to deal with individual cut and unmounted slides and prices tend to be higher.</li>

<li>Take care if you have slides mounted in glass. They may break and damage the original in the mail ( has happened to me) and can interfere with scanner focus. May well be better to remove the mount yourself and find someone who deals with individual cut frames than take these risks</li>

<li>Look carefully at what is included or available at extra cost by way of cleaning. When scanning at high magnification (often 4000ppi) every bit of dust is potentially visible . You could elect to tackle dust and spot removal yourself in Photoshop- possibly the best way- or elect to use a service offering a software-driven solution like Digital Ice which tend to cost a little sharpness. Not cleaning at all is unlikely to be the best option no matter how well the slides have been stored.</li>

<li>The cheapest forms of 35mm scanning may only be available at the point of processing or for material in full strips, carried out automatically by the scanning element of minilab processors-process and scan deals. You may not qualify for those prices.</li>

<li>You may find that the cheapest solutions offer scanning at 300/600 ppi. These scans are unlikely to fill a computer screen at good quality. To do that you need a service that scans in the low thousands of ppi.</li>

</ul>