A Quick Guide to Slide Scanners

Good choices for each cost and quality purpose

You’ve inherited all the slides your parents took of the family while growing up, on vacations, at birthdays, and special events. Or you have your own enormous collection. How can you get access to them again, to see, share, or edit and improve them?

Good quality scans will let you put the photos you want into your phone, on your desktop background rotation or smartTV slideshow, siblings can have complete copies of the slides, and the slides are now digital and can be backed up. You can even make different collections out of the entire set.

There are several good choices for digitizing (scanning) them!

Some devices take simple snapshots of the slides in seconds while others take 30 seconds to a minute to make high-quality highly-detailed archival scans, that can be used as-is or enhanced further in Lightroom or Photoshop.

smartPhone slide copying stand

These are simple cardboard or plastic stands with a battery-powered LED backlight for the slide. Your smartphone sits on top and simply takes a photo of the slide. The copying stand usually has a link for an app to help with the scans.

The quality of the light and lighting is one issue here. The setup should be used in a dim room to prevent ambient light reducing contrast in the image or reflecting off the slide and causing glare. The LED back-light must be smooth and even across the slide, and not be brighter along the edges.

One real problem is that most smartphones have their camera lenses near a corner or edge of the phone while most of these copy stands have the slide holder and camera hole in the center! It will be difficult, or impossible, to have the phone securely on the stand, lying flat (parallel to the slide), and the slide centered and squarely in the camera view.

These might have been a simple way to digitize slides or negatives years ago, but due to the position and size of the lens on newer phones being incompatible with the stand, and the low cost of the next category, these aren’t reasonable to consider.

Entry-level slide digitizers

These devices are the minimum to consider — their sensors, lenses, and film backlighting are all designed specifically for photographing the slide or negative inserted into the carrier. They usually save to an SD card but can often be connected to a PC via USB.

The quality of the image can still be affected by how flat and even the internal backlighting is, and the colour and noise performance of the sensor. Good sensors can capture detail in both bright scenes and shadows and will have little noise in flat areas such as skies.

Image resolution is sometimes misleading — be careful of any resolutions that are “interpreted”, “extrapolated”, or “up to”.

The price range for these (in February 2022) can start lower than the two examples shown, and go a bit higher. This could indicate the quality of the light and sensor, or additional features to adjust the exposure and appearance of the image.

Mid-level scanners

Scanners in the next higher category don’t take a photo of the slide, but scan across it with a linear sensor and light. This provides higher resolution, greater range of bright and dark detail, and lower noise in the image.

They might also include multi-sampling or multi-scanning to reduce noise and improve detail, and an infra-red scan to detect dust and scratches which can be partly, sometimes entirely, repaired by the scanning software.

These don’t operate stand-alone and require a connection to a computer and scanning software. One of the top ranked scanning software packages is Silverfast and is included with some scanner models. The software provides a great amount of control over the scan, such as exposure, and colour correction or restoration depending on the type of slide or film. I’ve been using the PlusTek 8200Ai and Silverfast software for several years with excellent results.

High-end scanners

The highest price category for non-commercial scanners adds automatic or semi-automatic slide feeding. They might also have even better backlighting and sensors than mid-range scanners from the same company.

If you have thousands of slides and need the high-quality image files they produce, these are a good option. They might not include an adapter to scan negatives, if that is also one of your requirements.

Flatbed slide and film scanners

Flatbed scanners can produce good image files, better than the entry level scanners but not as good as the mid-level scanners. However they also have the versatility to scan larger negatives, prints, and your home office work — and you might already own one.

The most common photo-quality flatbed scanners are Epson models V550 and higher.

Wrap-up

If you only need to scan slides and negatives occasionally but need very good image quality for use with an image editor (Lightroom, Photoshop, etc), then a scanner such as the Plustek Opticfilm 8200i or Pacific Image XAs Super Edition will be an excellent choice.

If you want to digitize a few slides from your collection for use online, on small displays, or slideshows on a smartTV, one of the entry level devices is worth buying, and not a loss if you decide to move up to a higher scanner later due to their affordability.

When you have thousands of slides to scan and require high image quality, the choice would be one of the high end automatic feeding scanners (although you will still need to work with each file afterwards), or send the slides to a service for scanning.

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