35mm slide scanners in 2026

MTGseattle · 2026-02-22T14:20:23-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T14:34:52-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T14:38:55-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T16:00:53-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T16:05:29-0500

MattKing said:
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 · 2026-02-22T17:32:34-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T20:40:46-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T20:47:17-0500

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 · 2026-02-22T20:50:55-0500

MTGseattle said:
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.

35mm slide scanners in 2026

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