35mm slide scanners in 2026

[MTGseattle]

Hello.
I just had my parents out for a bit and the topic of the family slide archive came up. I do have a fully functional epson 4990, but I wonder if there's something more efficient out there these days.
I've got an idea for a back-and-forth shipping case (3 full kodak carousels/trip).
To grab everything and send out sounds like a good idea until we take stock and realize there are close to 2k slides. (all of them may not warrant a full-res scan, so the ability to get a fast thumbnail might be important). Or simply a light table and loupe review.
So; 35mm slide digital archiving in 2026= is anything decent out there?

 

[loccdor]

I can digitize approximately 2 images per minute with a digicam/macro lens/light source/film holder/copystand setup. Could double the speed if I disabled the higher detail Pixel Shift feature. It does require more active participation than a scanner. Slide is the easiest to digitize because you don't need to worry as much about stray light or color correction. With a setup like this you just lock the focus and shoot each image with a cable release at the same settings, making sure the exposure is just enough not to blow out the highlights of a bright slide. Images are normally processed in RawTherapee but you could theoretically do straight JPGs and save even more time, for slide film.

You'd need something which accurately holds the slide in the same spot with relation to the camera. Wouldn't be too hard to DIY something like that.

 

[MattKing]

I'm part way through my father's slides, and I have a long way to go!
My advice would be to spend a lot of time first organizing and then viewing them with a hand magnifier, with a view toward making hard edit/discard choices at that stage.
I use one of these to do that - thrift stores can be your friend:

I swapped in an LED replacement for the bulb to keep it cool.
As I go, I try to put them in date order, and make notes about subjects in a written document that is easily edited.
If your family is like my Dad, there will be lots of flower pictures and the like that can be added to the discard bag.
With that process done, you can revisit whether you want to invest in equipment, or pay someone to do it for you.
If you organize and catalogue them first, you can consider getting relatively low resolution scans done commercially, and then using those for sharing and investigating whether particular slides warrant higher resolution results.
If you develop some sort of cataloguing system, you may wish to consider adding handwritten codes to slide mounts.

 

[runswithsizzers]

It is not clear to me from your opening post if you want help with how to:
a. sort through a lot of slides so you can pick out the ones worth scanning and then pay someone to scan them?
- or -
b. getting a scanner so you can digitize them yourself?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I'm part way through my father's slides, and I have a long way to go!
My advice would be to spend a lot of time first organizing and then viewing them with a hand magnifier, with a view toward making hard edit/discard choices at that stage.
I use one of these to do that - thrift stores can be your friend:
View attachment 418758

I swapped in an LED replacement for the bulb to keep it cool.
As I go, I try to put them in date order, and make notes about subjects in a written document that is easily edited.
If your family is like my Dad, there will be lots of flower pictures and the like that can be added to the discard bag.
With that process done, you can revisit whether you want to invest in equipment, or pay someone to do it for you.
If you organize and catalogue them first, you can consider getting relatively low resolution scans done commercially, and then using those for sharing and investigating whether particular slides warrant higher resolution results.
If you develop some sort of cataloguing system, you may wish to consider adding handwritten codes to slide mounts.

I've one ;like that about twice the size with lights that are rated white. I haven;t used it in about thrity years so I don;t know if it still works. It was very expensive at the time. I wonder if it;s worth anything today. It;s great for sorting slides.

 

[plummerl]

I've been scanning with my Sony a7RIII for about 5 years now. I've scanned my collection:

35mm neg=16958
120=1839
645=366
4x5=159
Slides=7307

I'm now getting ready to scan my father's collection of slides. His collection most likely started in the late 50's or early 60's. As a fellow Seattleite, your welcome to check my setup out, we are near Children's Hospital (North Laurelhurst). It consists of the Sony, with a Sigma 105mm F2.8 DG DN Macro Art lens, the Essential Film Holder (EFH) with masks for all the above formats, except 4x5. I use an Omega 4x5 holder for 4x5.

I have a baltic birch frame that holds both the LED light panel and the EFH. This is all set under the camera mounted on a Kaiser copy stand setup.

I'm using the NLP plugin with Lightroom Classic. This has been a very big help in recovering some of my slides from the 80's, when I was a big user of Agfachrome. Most of these have been hit with color degradation, very recoverable with NLP. Of course, my Kodachromes have all survived in stunning color.

 

[xkaes]

I imagine that digital copying will be (is?) a major blow (demise?) to the scanner industry. Once set up it's much faster and much easier for copying film. There are lots of discussions about this on this FORUM about how to set one up.

One thing to consider when "choosing" is that some descendants might appreciate some shots that you think are worthless. The other time-consuming part is cataloging -- who, what, where, when, why, etc. A photo without that is not very helpful in 20 years. How about 120?

 

[ntenny]

I just went through 15,000 slides with a 4990. It was quite a slog, but I imagine it would have been a lot worse if I’d had to interact with every slide individually instead of batches of 8–at some point it just becomes impossible to review images instead of just mechanically cranking them through. Do people have a good workflow for ploughing through large piles of slides with camera scanning? It seems like batch automation would be hard.

Most of them are of little interest, but the problem is the time demand of determining which ones those are. (In my case they were from my wife’s family, so I didn’t always know who the subjects were and the context and so on. I decided it was better just to capture everything.)

-NT

 

[Paul Howell]

Hello.
I just had my parents out for a bit and the topic of the family slide archive came up. I do have a fully functional epson 4990, but I wonder if there's something more efficient out there these days.
I've got an idea for a back-and-forth shipping case (3 full kodak carousels/trip).
To grab everything and send out sounds like a good idea until we take stock and realize there are close to 2k slides. (all of them may not warrant a full-res scan, so the ability to get a fast thumbnail might be important). Or simply a light table and loupe review.
So; 35mm slide digital archiving in 2026= is anything decent out there?

You can pay to have it done, there are company that specialize in digitalizing slides, movie film and VCR tapes. You can find a list of companies, check consumer ratings, then get a price.

 

[plummerl]

I've camera scanned over 8000 slides. I also have a 4990 and a Cano FS4000US. Trust me, with a proper setup, you can scan slides at a very fast pace. The two scanners take many minutes to process a batch of slides.

With camera scanning, it's as simple as putting the slide in the holder, pressing the shutter, process next slide.

I use the Sony remote software connected to the camera. The images are automatically transferred to my computer.

I just went through 15,000 slides with a 4990. It was quite a slog, but I imagine it would have been a lot worse if I’d had to interact with every slide individually instead of batches of 8–at some point it just becomes impossible to review images instead of just mechanically cranking them through. Do people have a good workflow for ploughing through large piles of slides with camera scanning? It seems like batch automation would be hard.

Most of them are of little interest, but the problem is the time demand of determining which ones those are. (In my case they were from my wife’s family, so I didn’t always know who the subjects were and the context and so on. I decided it was better just to capture everything.)

-NT

 

[ntenny]

I use the Sony remote software connected to the camera. The images are automatically transferred to my computer.

Do these camera-control apps do things like file naming in an organized way? One of the process criteria I had was that people need to be able to start from a file and find the original slide—e.g., in case someone wants to get a higher-grade pro scan of a specific frame. So it’s important to automate a file structure that reflects the physical storage: “box 03/carousel 08/frame037.tif”, etc. If the files come out with digital camera names like IMG_1132.jpg (or whatever format), they’d all need to be touched manually for organizing. So that’s one of the things I worried about.

My dad sent a smaller batch to a local scan service (imaginatively called “Scan-Slides”); they did a good job scanning, but the files came back in a few big folders in no particular order. It seems like a tall order to ask a service like that to use a file organization that will work for an individual customer’s use case.

-NT

 

[koraks]

Yiu could batch-rename files. Most scan apps including Epson Scan and the old Minolta Dimage scan software also allow a file name template to be set and the scan app increments a suffixed identifier with every scan saved. Categorizing in folders of course involves some degree of manual intervention; after all, there's no way for a scanner or camera to know where a piece of film physically came from.

 

[ntenny]

Yiu could batch-rename files. Most scan apps including Epson Scan and the old Minolta Dimage scan software also allow a file name template to be set and the scan app increments a suffixed identifier with every scan saved.

Right, that’s my point: The desktop scanner control apps do it, but I’m wondering if the remote-camera apps can do something similar. If they can, it would go a long way towards making a large batch-scan operation practical.

-NT

 

[koraks]

I’m wondering if the remote-camera apps can do something similar

It's a moot point since you can mass-rename files. Doesn't really matter if you input the template once and then an app creates all files with that template, or if you just take a bunch of randomly-named files and then rename them with the same template. What matters is that the sequence remains in tact and I think that's pretty easy to ensure.
For Windows there's this tool: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/powerrename
On Linux this can be done straight in bash. I'm sure Mac has a feature or utility for this as well.

 

[runswithsizzers]

On the Mac, I use NameChanger for batch renaming.

I do like to replace default file names from my camera or scanner with descriptive names, but I usually do that in Lightroom.

I digitize my film with a digital camera, and import the files into Adobe Lightroom Classic. I don't actually rename the RAW files from the camera, but I assign each file a descriptive Title in Lightroom. If I export an edited version of the RAW as a JPG or TIF, then I will have Lightroom substitute the title as the file name for the exported file.

I want the renamed file to reference back to the camera filename so:
RAW filname = XT116603.RAF
Title = stacked_wood+snow-t6603

So if I am using the JPG or TIF outside of Lightroom, say to make a photo book or for posting online, then I can always search Lightroom for "6603" to easily find the original raw file if I need to edit it, or export a different size, etc.

Including a number from the camera file name in the renamed version also helps prevent having duplicate file names. Rather than having three different images each named "sunflower.jpg" -- I will have sunflower-5793.jpg, sunflower-5794.jpg, sunflower-8876.jpg, etc.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Irfanview (free) app has batch conversion and renaming. It also has simple quick crops and other edits, rezising, etc.
Download the Plugins too.

IrfanView - Official Homepage - One of the Most Popular Viewers Worldwide

IrfanView ... one of the most popular viewers worldwide.

www.irfanview.com

Here's what batch replace/ rename looks like. You can change formats etc as well.

 

[plummerl]

Do these camera-control apps do things like file naming in an organized way? One of the process criteria I had was that people need to be able to start from a file and find the original slide—e.g., in case someone wants to get a higher-grade pro scan of a specific frame. So it’s important to automate a file structure that reflects the physical storage: “box 03/carousel 08/frame037.tif”, etc. If the files come out with digital camera names like IMG_1132.jpg (or whatever format), they’d all need to be touched manually for organizing. So that’s one of the things I worried about.

My dad sent a smaller batch to a local scan service (imaginatively called “Scan-Slides”); they did a good job scanning, but the files came back in a few big folders in no particular order. It seems like a tall order to ask a service like that to use a file organization that will work for an individual customer’s use case.

-NT

With my Sony, I'm using the Sony Imaging Edge Remote application. It allows for complete camera control, as well as full control over file naming. I can also direct the image sent from the camera to any location on my network.

Before I start a session, I'm using a PrintFile negative holder, or slide storage boxes, each labeled with my storage system numeration. The Remote app lets me set the filename prefix with a starting number, derived from the source name, attached to the prefix, that keeps incrementing with each shot made with the camera. For instance, if my PrintFile has a file number of 00009, if the negative is a 35mm, I'll use the following settings (small portion of the Remote App):

With my file naming system, I can immediately go to the source image, negative or slide. Works great!

For my slides I have an Excel spreadsheet that contains references to the numbering nomenclature, as well as a description of subject matter. For storage I'm using Archival Methods slide storage box system.

 

[MTGseattle]

More data points; I'm fresh home from heart surgery, so my physical activities are truncated a bit.

I no longer own a macro lens, a copy stand or any slide duplicating gear. If we ignore camera bodies, I think I see about $500 worth of gear in @loccdor setup above. (used prices, Canon ef compatible)

I do own 2 different light tables and a few loupes, so sorting equipment is in hand.

I guess a refinement to my question would be; Is scanning 35mm slides with my 4990 going to be painful enough to warrant an investment in different gear? Canon ef 100mm macro (I have owned and sold this lens twice, so we're headed into annoying territory)
or one of the current plustek scanner options.

The other irony is that once I decide then order then setup, I'll likely be free from light duty tasks anyway. Ah planning.

I could also call a few services and see how many slides I could get scanned for my equipment budget.

 

[MattKing]

A light duty prescription seems perfect for pre-sorting and editing .
Assuming it will bring back good memories, it might be therapeutic as well.
When you are finished that, you will have a much better idea of the final amount of scanning necessary.
Best wishes in your recovery.

 

[loccdor]

I think I see about $500 worth of gear in @loccdor setup above.

Budget version:

You already have Canon EF camera
Mount any 50mm cheap vintage macro lens on it (you don't need infinity so flange focal distance of canon EF doesn't matter) ($50)
Cheap vintage extension tube if you need it for 1:1 ($10-30)
Adapters to mount it ($10-25)
Light table light source (you have this)
Tripod that can aim the camera straight down (you probably already have this)
Some matboard/plastic board/tape/etc to block stray light and hold the slide in the same place every time

Under $100 in your case. Once you finish you can even sell most of that and recoup the majority of the cost.

Have a good recovery.

 

[MTGseattle]

I have the 35mm mounted slide carrier for my enlarger. I bet I could get the camera height/focus dialed in so that that became my mask.
+ reasonably heavy, so less chance of the carrier/slide "wiggling." A bit of tape would go a long way here too.

Is there a published color temp of scanning light sources? I can only guess that it's pretty high (daylight)?

My led light table has a dial, and my old Porta-trace has the "daylight corrected" fluorescent tubes.

 

[MattKing]

@koraks might have a few words to say about light sources
It isn't so much the colour temperature of the source, as the completeness and continuity of the emitted spectrum.
The fluorescent tubes would probably be dreadful for this.
The LED light table may be good, and may also be dreadful.
An incandescent bulb is usually good, if warm and hard to get even.
Electronic flash is really good, if you can rig up a "modeling" light as well.

 

[loccdor]

I have the 35mm mounted slide carrier for my enlarger. I bet I could get the camera height/focus dialed in so that that became my mask.
+ reasonably heavy, so less chance of the carrier/slide "wiggling." A bit of tape would go a long way here too.

Absolutely you can. You'll want it high enough above your light source so that the light source is out of focus, easy enough to do with a little cardboard.

I use a Cs-Lite. It's $45. Has white, warm, and cool modes: I use white for slide.

I've heard of phone screens being used.

 

[benderscameracorner]

It isn't so much the colour temperature of the source, as the completeness and continuity of the emitted spectrum.
The fluorescent tubes would probably be dreadful for this.

CRI90+ fluoro tubes are/were available but very much a specialist item... for studios, retail displays, aquariums etc. Your average tube from the hardware store is more like CRI50-60, definitely dreadful.

I use a Cs-Lite. It's $45. Has white, warm, and cool modes: I use white for slide.

+1 CS-Lite. It's cheap for a CRI95 light source and very good quality. You're spending a tonne more for CRI99, and I think for most use cases you'll barely notice the tiny tiny difference in R9 output.

Agree on just using white light for slides rather than than the 'warm' option CineStill and others suggest to balance out Ektachrome's supposed cool bias. Theory goes that all slide film was biased a little cool to balance out the inherent warmness of incandescent bulbs in slide projectors. However in practice I've found it well, kinda just looks like arse when DSLR scanned. More effective just to give the colour temp a little nudge warm in Lightroom if the image seems too blue.

Though honestly the last few rolls of Ektachrome I've shot - admittedly in bright Australian summer light - are pretty well bang on for colour balance.

 

[plummerl]

I have the 35mm mounted slide carrier for my enlarger. I bet I could get the camera height/focus dialed in so that that became my mask.
+ reasonably heavy, so less chance of the carrier/slide "wiggling." A bit of tape would go a long way here too.

Is there a published color temp of scanning light sources? I can only guess that it's pretty high (daylight)?

My led light table has a dial, and my old Porta-trace has the "daylight corrected" fluorescent tubes.

For a light source, I use a Relano LED Video Light Panel, that works very well (and is inexpensive!): (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087CZ85GV?th=1).

Generally, if you're shooting raw, white balance is less of a factor. I generally have the light panel set to 5500K.

When I first started, I used a 50mm & 80mm enlarging lenses, attached to a bellows. This worked very well, but I've since moved on to a 105mm Sigma Art macro lens, with spectacular results.