During the last week or so, as well as setting up the Mac mini, we have started a mammoth scanning session. We have somewhere between 6000 and 7000 35mm slides in the cellar, which we haven’t looked at for at least ten years because we’re too lazy to set up the projector and screen. The slides go back about 40 years – to our respective childhoods. We decided that rather than have them taking up space we need, we would scan them digitally and then dump the slides, the projector and screen.
So we’ve rented a Reflecta DigitDia 4000 scanner and some professional scanner software (SilverFast Ai with IT-8 calibration), because a test we read reported that the scanner’s own software is not too hot. The scanner is the only model we could find that can scan up to 100 slides at a time, meaning that we can set it running and it is busy for the next several hours before it needs feeding again – most scanners only handle 4 or 6 slides at time, which just isn’t practical if you have thousands to process.
At first we thought we might have wasted our time and money – the highly recommended Silverfast software is great for scanning single slides, but the calibration didn’t seem to offer any improvement over the other software package as far as colour was concerned and with the scratch/dust removal filter set (which is supposed to used the scanners special “ICE” hardware filter) a tray of 50 slides was taking nearly 24 hours to scan.
