Got slides you wanta digitize?

If you've been following my blog recently then you are aware that I've been on a digitizing spree. It started in April with scanning a few photos for my mother's 80th birthday and evolved into a project to scan our family's picture albums. That's almost done, just waiting for my niece to get her part of the project completed ;-)

The next phase was started this past week with the purchase of a ScanSnap S300 scanner for digitizing my genealogy documents and correspondence. I really can't say enough about that little scanner. It is amazingly quick with very good quality. I heartily recommend it!

All the while I've been wondering how to digitize my slide collection. I've researched scanning services found online but the cost per slide (anywhere from $.35 to $.65 cents EACH) was prohibitive. Too much money. I tested the slide scanning capability of my flatbed scanner. The results were good but it took several minutes to scan each slide. Too much time. I investigated purchasing a scanner made specifically for digitizing slides. But after reading reviews and blog posts about the process have decided against that method. Too much time and too much money.

The other day a friend and I were discussing our scanning projects. She had purchased a slide scanner but gave up after scanning only a few as it took too much time. Then she mentioned that someone had told her about a place where you could get slides digitized at a very reasonable price. That place? Wal-Mart. Yeah, right. So I stopped by my local Wal-Mart store and found out that they do indeed scan slides to CD. (I don't know if every Wal-Mart has this capability though, you'll have to ask.) Their price? $2.50 for 40 slides. That's only 6.25 CENTS for each slide! To say that I was skeptical would be putting it mildly.

On Thursday, after selecting 80 slides of varying quality and subject matter, I dropped them off for processing. Yesterday I picked up the slides and their accompanying CD. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality. They are NOT high resolution archival images but they will give you a decent 4x6 printed image. And they look good on the computer screen. And, I think for my purposes they will do just fine. Very few of my slides were ever printed. I'm not interested in making large prints or prints of any size for that matter, I just want to be able to view the pictures again and enjoy re-visiting the places I've been.

The old adage "you get what you pay for" definitely applies here. You won't get archival quality images for 6 cents but you will get acceptable images for viewing on-screen. So, as I'm scanning my genealogy documents I'll also be spending some time sorting through my slides selecting those to be digitized. This may not be acceptable to you but I thought I'd present it as an alternative to the higher priced digitizing services. Try it with a selection of 40 slides and see what you think. At worst, you'll only waste $2.50 to find out if it is worthwhile for you.

Yellowstone National Park, July 1979
Copyright © 1979/.. by Rebeckah R. Wiseman