Slide Scanner Reviews

Remember the good old days when you took photos of happy memories in your film camera? Now everybody is using digital cameras so that everybody can store photos in an easy-to-view digital format. Still, many happy memories lay in the past. A modern day slide scanner will allow you to scan slides and store photos in digital format.

Slide scanners, or film scanners are designed to scan photographic film (negatives) and store them as viewable images (like positives) on your computer. All scanned negatives can be stored in .jpeg format on your computer.

Of course when we say 'old photos' taken with your film camera, they are old, and dusty, which is really the problem, unless you haven't protected your film like the most precious thing in the world. Obviously you can't have. But that problem is easily solved with infrared cleaning technologies in slide scanners. Photographic film is transparent to infrared light but dust and scratches are not. Dust and scratches are illuminated by the infrared light. Thus dust and scratches on the slide are, and this is removed when the image is produced on the computer.

If your slide scanner doesn't have the infrared cleaning technology, graphic manipulation programs should do the trick. I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop for doing this. This is called film restoration. There are many tutorials online and this would help you to learn how to do it.

There are differerent types of film restoration. The simplest is median filter, or despeckle, as referred to in most graphic manipulation programs, and is quite easy to learn. Median filter is especially useful to remove speckle noise and salt and pepper noise, giving great image quality.

Slide scanners can accept strips of either 35 mm or 120 mm film, or individual slides (cumbersome!). High-end slide scanners have interchangeable film loaders. This enables one scanning platform to scan different sizes and packages of film. For example, some allow microscope slides to be loaded for scanning, while mechanised slide loaders allow many individual slides to be batch scanned unattended.

There are various brands to choose from. I'd recommed the Canon CanoScan series of slide scanners. Many of its products equipped with infrared cleaning and other latest technologies, it is highly recommended for quality film scanning.

If you want all those old photos in film right on your computer, then it's high time you got yourself a slide scanner. So check that budget, grab some money and get a slide scanner now!