By Lou Dolinar
First in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

'Now that you've retired," my wife said recently, "why don't you scan all those slides I took on World Campus Afloat in 1971?" Never one to pass up a picture of a hippie chick in a bikini top, I agreed.

We'd never owned a slide projector, and only occasionally reviewed the 500 slides of her trip around the world using one of those little hand held optical viewers. With our daughter getting ready to head off to college, I figured it was as good a time as any to archive and put them into some kind of viewable shape for a CD- based slide show. Heck, we might even print some enlargements on my nifty new HP Photos mart 8450 printer, which has been doing yeoman work with prints from my digital camera.

If you're thinking of a similar project, the good news is that you probably have most of the gear you need to get started. The first requirement is a reasonably fast PC no more than 2 or 3 years old, a printer of similar vintage, plus a CD or DVD writer for storing and playing back digital images. To that you need to add your only major purchase, a scanner, at $200 and up. This basic setup can scan and archive slides, color and black and white negatives, and photos.

One of our readers, Van R. Field, has even resurrected old tintypes and glass negatives with a cheap flatbed scanner. Software comes free with the hardware or can be downloaded from the Internet.

The biggest investment for home users is time. Low-cost gear can produce high-quality results with any media but takes forever. For home users, as opposed to pros, more money buys more speed but not much more usable quality. You might even want to pay a service to scan for you. On the other hand, if you're willing to invest the time to learn photo retouching, you'll be able to perform miracles with old prints that you can't pay people to do.

Here are your options:

Scanning services. Available locally (check the Yellow Pages under photographic color prints, compact discs and transparencies) or over the Internet. If you have more money than time, these outfits will convert your slides, negatives or photos to digital format, optionally to a slide show with music. Prices start at about 50 cents an image for low-res scans of slides suitable for display over TV and computer monitors and snapshot-size photos. Prices escalate quickly ($2 and up) for manual retouching and for high-res formats suitable for making 8-by-10 color prints or larger. The sky's the limit for major custom work, for example, restoring a tattered and torn sepia print that is decades old.

Film scanners. These give the best results for negatives and slides. Entry level here is defined by the Nikon Coolscan V, available for around $600. Designed for high quality and high speed, this unit will bang out a slide every 30 seconds. Images tend to be sharper than produced by flatbed scanners. It incorporates something called "Digital ICE," which automates pretty much all the corrections that you'd want to apply to film, though this slows processing down a lot. The downside to units like the Nikon (besides cost) is that all you can scan is film - usually just tiny 35-mm slides and negatives - no document scanning to Word, for example. Nor will it scan photos, or oversize negatives, so you're probably going to have to have to buy a flatbed scanner anyway.

Flatbed scanners. Until quite recently, entry-level flatbeds weren't particularly good all-around scanners. More than adequate for photos and text, 600 or even 1200 dots per inch just didn't cut it for anything other than casual work with slides and negatives. Contemporary models are another matter altogether. My Epson Perfection 4180, which I just bought for a little over $200 at Best Buy, approaches the quality of a dedicated film scanner. It has a built-in back light and plastic holders for slides, negatives and oversize negatives. Some newer models, surprisingly inexpensive, have auto film feeders.

Unfortunately, it takes five minutes to scan a slide or negative at its highest resolution. In theory, you can process well over a hundred slides an hour through the Nikon, where you'd be lucky to get a dozen with my Epson. Things aren't quite as bad as they sound, however, because the Epson can scan four slides at a time, and up to a dozen negatives, so like me, you can do the laundry and ironing for your wife while your scanner percolates.

When you shop, check such usual review sites as Cnet and PC World. I usually find the user reviews (including the ones at Amazon) more useful than the ones the site sponsors.

Next week we'll look at some unavoidably unpleasant technical details, including resolution and photo compression.