Digitizing Old Slides

More than 20 years ago, I tried to digitize my old slides and negatives into computer files. I gave up. The computer that I had at the time lacked the horsepower to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. Today, things have changed and it is going easy as pie. It is sure fun to see these pictures again, without hauling the ol’ slide projector and screen out of the basement.

Here is one sample, a Kodachrome slide from 1997.

My scanner is a Nikon Coolscan V ED. It is a very capable machine, designed for scanning 35mm slides and film. It scans in visible light and also infrared. It uses the infrared to see around or through bits of dust and small scratches; even slides where are not perfectly clean look great after scanning. It scans at up to 4000 DPI, which is the equivalent of about a 24 megapixel digital camera. All of that was pretty amazing for a consumer machine released in 2003.

I have been shooting slides since I bought a Nikkormat with the cash that I received as gifts for my bar mitzvah in 1971. I have a basement full of old slides and negatives which I would love to have access to again. I bought one of those scanners when it came out. It was a stretch moneywise but I figured it would be worth the investment.

Then I started looking for software. I pretty quickly tumbled to VueScan by Hamrick Software. It was only a couple of years old but was lightyears ahead of anything else in terms of being able to batch process slide and negative scans. I bought that, too.

My workflow looked like this:

1. Pull a slide out of the tray or box. Insert it into the scanner.
2. Wait about 30 seconds for the preview to appear.
3. Rotate the image to be right side up.
4. Set the crop to the edges of the slide.
5. Press the Scan button.
6. Wait several minutes for the slide to scan and VueScan to process it and save it.
7. Repeat.

It was horrible. In order to only wait “several minutes,” I was scanning at just 1000 DPI, not the full 4000 DPI that the scanner was capable of. Being scanned at low resolution, the images lacked the crispness and detail of the original photos. The manual cropping and rotation demanded enough attention that I could not do much of anything else while I was scanning. Did I tell you that it was horrible?

After scanning a couple of batches of slides, I gave up.

Fast forward 22 years. Computers are faster. VueScan has improved with more automation. I decided to try again. Voila! It works perfectly. I am finally getting what I wanted way back then. The only part that is not fully automated is picking up the slides and putting them into the scanner. I probably need a humanoid robot.

My workflow now looks like this:

1. Pull a slide out of the tray or box. Insert it into the scanner.
2. Walk away. Come back after two or three minutes.
3. Repeat.

The results look fantastic. I cranked through a tray of Kodachrome from 1997. When I displayed them on my big OLED TV, they look as good as the original slides. I did literally nothing to them other than insert each slide into the scanner.

Were I starting from scratch today, I would probably buy a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE Film Scanner, which can be had for about $400 brand new. Like my Nikon Coolscan V ED, it also has infrared dust/scratch removal. My old Nikon is exactly what I need and it is already on my desk. It is plenty sharp enough to pick up the grain in the film so I do not need any more resolution. Nikon’s ED glass lenses produce excellent color.

To say that I am delighted would be an understatement. I certainly did not think that it would take two decades for my investment to pay off but I found other ways to amuse myself in the meantime. Now I have yet another obsession to keep me busy on these long cold winter days.

You can see the whole batch of Kodachrome slides that I digitized here: Rocky Mountain National Park 1997. I make absolutely no claim that the photography is anything special. My excuse is that in July 1997 I was bedazzled by love, being on a magic vacation to the mountains with Candy, and barely able to operate a camera.