Save Your Non-Digital Pictures With a 35mm Slide Scanner

The digital age has meant that slides, which would have been projected onto a screen, lie in drawers and cupboards unseen. Older people in particular cherish memories of earlier times, the 35mm slide scanner enables them to revisit those memories and see those cherished pictures again.

Slide Scanners

While it is possible to use an all in one flatbed scanner, you get a better result when you use a dedicated photo slide scanner, which makes storing and printing images a lot faster than before. When you use a dedicated film and slide scanner 35mm, you make scanning and transferring those precious images to your computer a lot easier and quicker.

Types of Slide Scanners

You can get different sizes and types of photo slide scanner today and each one will come with the manufacturer’s software. A scanner’s software is extremely important because it is the software that enables you to edit, save and store your pictures on a computer. There are two basic types of scanner, the flatbed scanner that scans documents as well as images, and the dedicated slide scanner, which is the subject of this article.

Photo slide scanners are made by a number of well known manufacturers, e.g. Polaroid, Nikon and HP, and range from the mid to high price range, depending on your needs and preference.  You need to decide exactly what you want your scanner to do as this will be your preliminary guide when looking for a scanner. If you want to rehabilitate old slides and family photos then a mid price item should do the job well enough. The best place to start looking is one of the price comparison sites on the internet as this will give you a better idea of what the various models do.

Using Your Scanner

The scanner and the software come as a unit, and you need to insert the software CD in your computer’s CD drive as this enables you to load and work with your images. Once the software CD is loaded you have to open the file and choose the source or type of scan, if you’re working with slides for example, you just click on the positive color film and the scan will start. Once the image is scanned it goes to the preview screen, if you are not happy with the image you can edit it in preview before completing the scan.

If you are going to scan old slides and films then the first thing you need to do is make sure that the images are clean and free from dust. Decide on how you are going to categorize your images e.g. by date or subject as this makes them easier to find once they have been scanned and stored. It’s a good idea to sort your categorized slides by thickness so you don’t have to keep altering the scanner settings.

You need to make sure your 35mm slide scanner is set to the recommended resolution of 300 dpi as this gives a much better quality image. Just remember that if you increase the resolution, you also increase the time it takes to scan the image. If you are only scanning small files they can be saved as BMP on a PC and TIF if you use a Mac. Larger files will need to be saved as TIF on both a PC and a Mac.