Need scanner advice

gobble gobble

All,



I'm looking for a slide scanner for 35 mm positive film that's OS X compatible (not Classic). Hopefully it won't cost more than a few hundred dollars. All of the models I've seen so far are either a thousand plus dollars and/or aren't OS X compatible.



Basically I've got a couple of old shoeboxes full of my parents travel slides and would like to scan them in and eventually put them into iPhoto. Is anyone out there doing something similar under OS X?



GG

pesi

is that the only thing you're ever going to use the scanner for?



you might just want to take all the slides in someplace and have them scanned for you and thrown onto a PhotoCD, depending on the cost...

gobble gobble

[quote]Originally posted by pesi:

<strong>is that the only thing you're ever going to use the scanner for?



you might just want to take all the slides in someplace and have them scanned for you and thrown onto a PhotoCD, depending on the cost...</strong><hr></blockquote>



Yeah - I'm thinking about just giving the boxes to Kodak but I need to work out the cost like you suggested. My Mom swears that a bunch of her friends want me to scan in their slide collections too, but I really don't have time for that.

gorebug

You may try this site:



<a href="http://kenrockwell.com/tech/scanner.htm"; target="_blank">Scanner Recommendations</a>



He is fairly experienced.

anand

I was in the same boat as you. I had 300+ slides from my parents that dated back to the 50's and 60's. I scanned them all in and made a DVD movie for them.



I was going to buy a low end Nikon - which can be had for $500-$800 but in the end bought a Epson 2450 firewire flatbed scanner with a tray for 4 slides. You need Photoshop or Elements 2 to really use the scanner as all epson has is a twain driver. You can use image capture but that does not work as well. With Photoshop you can automatically preview and scan 4 slides at a go. You just have the "play with" the images afterwords. I know the Nikons have the IDE which works great but costs a bunch. And no flatbed scanner offers IDE for slides.



I don't know how this compares to a true slide scanner but I scanned most of the slides at 2400 DPI and generated a bunch of 30-50 MB images that I imported into iPhoto2. Before this I did some cleanup with Photoshop - Elements should work as well. From there it is really easy to make a slide show DVD using iDVD3. Don't go through iMovie as this makes your slides look like crap.



The Epson 2450 was $399 but does not come with a firewire cable. The best part is that scans have improved greatly with 10.2.4. I can scann a regular picture at 300 DPI in seconds. For the slides, 2400 DPI images took about 2-3 minutes. This is on a iMac 800 with 768 Ram.



Hope this helps!

mntrapper

The three current nikon slide scanners are now supported in os x. It doesn't say so on the page but if you go into the knowledge base you will find that nikon scan 3.1.4 is needed for os x and a firmware upgrade is recommended. Hope this helps you out.



[quote]Originally posted by gobble gobble:

<strong>All,



I'm looking for a slide scanner for 35 mm positive film that's OS X compatible (not Classic). Hopefully it won't cost more than a few hundred dollars. All of the models I've seen so far are either a thousand plus dollars and/or aren't OS X compatible.



Basically I've got a couple of old shoeboxes full of my parents travel slides and would like to scan them in and eventually put them into iPhoto. Is anyone out there doing something similar under OS X?



GG</strong><hr></blockquote>

gobble gobble

All,



Thanks for the info. I checked out the Minolta Scan Elite II and while it's a bit expensive, I figure that I can always sell it on Ebay when I'm done. However, Minolta only lists compatibility up to 10.1.5 and the accompanying Elements does not seem to be OS X native. Does anyone have experience with this film scanner?