35mm slide scanners in 2026

benderscameracorner said:

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.

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And a further caution - the "CRI" rating is not necessarily a reliable measure of how suitable a light source is for digitizing film.
Our eyes/visual systems and digital sensors have important differences. A high CRI means that the light source will cause the colours of things to look good to human visual systems. It does not necessarily mean that the light source will cause the colours of things to render accurately on film or on digital sensors.
there are lighting standards that will give accurate indications about colour response in film and digital. You would be most likely to find people referencing those standards in the motion picture film industry, and the lights that are sold with those standards specified are likely way above most of our budgets.
High CRI doesn't hurt, and may coincidentally be found on light sources that do respond well when used for digitization, but it is also possible that a high CRI source has spectral discontinuities that create problems with the sensor you are employing.

runswithsizzers said:

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.

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With my dad's hundreds of slides from all over the world, I applied a naming convention of <Date_specific-location_City_Country>. I use this when I scan the item. I do the same for my negatives and slides. For example, the full size scan of the Kodachrome below is <19501016b_Tram_Cairo_Egypt.TIF>. While scanning, I try to correct color (if necessary) and crop (if necessary) for each frame. I do not understand how a bulk automated scanning can be successful, or how bulk naming can work. Also, I find the follow-up work takes a lot of time. I add some Exif information, especially date (if known) and a title.

The key to a project that is not too overwhelming is to purge the bad slides/negatives ruthlessly. I am using a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED film scanner running on a Windows 7 computer.

Thanks everyone for the various tips. I've got some decisions to make. I think my uncle has a few hundred slides as well. D'oh!

unidentified trees, blown exposures, people whom no one can remember/identify; all will be culled prior to scanning.

MTGseattle said:

Thanks everyone for the various tips. I've got some decisions to make. I think my uncle has a few hundred slides as well. D'oh!

unidentified trees, blown exposures, people whom no one can remember/identify; all will be culled prior to scanning.

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In my case, I discarded all "pretty" pictures - the sunsets, flowers, dramatic unidentified landscapes from the USA west. I think the valuable photographs are ones where you see a clear difference compared to the situation today, such as a city scene without modern office buildings, or a street scene with older signs and autos.

Nikon made a slide feeder for their Coolscan 4000 and 5000 scanners. With that, you just stack the slides in it and go do something else. Won't be cheap buy you can of course sell it after you are done. That would be the most automatic way of scanning what you have. I believe there was another scanner from Plustek or someone that also had a slide feeder but I couldn't tell you the name off the top of my head.

MattKing said:

High CRI doesn't hurt, and may coincidentally be found on light sources that do respond well when used for digitization, but it is also possible that a high CRI source has spectral discontinuities that create problems with the sensor you are employing.

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True, and minor colour balance issues are easily remedied (or utterly overridden) by inversion and further post-processing anyway.

Even illumination across the light panel is way more important. Dealing with it after-the-fact via flat field images etc. never worked well for me (with my mini fluoro lightbox I bought in 1998)