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.