20+ year old railroad slides

[Anonymous]

How does one take a digital pic of a slide shown on a wall? I hae quite a few such slides, but they are fading with age. Can anyone help?

[kschmidt]

Greetings,

I don't know how well that would work. I would suggest a slide scanner or some flatbed scanners also have slide adapters. A decent slide scanner would probably cost around $300-$400. This will give the best results. Alot of the slide scanners come with software to remove dust and other things.

Good Luck

[mucable]

I agree with Keith, a scanner would be the best way to go. If you are in need of the very best quality, there are devices from Nikon, Canon, etc. that are designed to copy only slides and 35mm filmstrips, negatives, etc. They are kind of pricey, but you could probably auction it off on e-bay or amazon when you've finished scanning your collection. Might even be a home-based business here....hmmmm.

[IRONROOSTER]

You might check with a photo shop and see if they offer a slide to digital service, depending on how many you have this might be a cheaper route.
Enjoy
Paul

[eastside]

QUOTE: Originally posted by warnick1998

How does one take a digital pic of a slide shown on a wall? I hae quite a few such slides, but they are fading with age. Can anyone help?

You can but the results will be awful. Do you know what kind of slides, Ektachrome, Kodachrome? Ektachrome from 20 years ago should be in good shape. Kodachromes have nearly archival keeping properties and with good storage should keep hundreds of years. Projecting them causes deterioration.

If you're into computers and are serious about photography consider a slide scanner such as from Canon, Minolta, or Nikon. I suggest you try Kodak's slide to CD service first to transfer a few slides so you can get an idea of what you'd get if you bought your own scanner. By the way, scanning is a pretty labor intensive activity. You have to clean, mount, pre-scan, make corrections, scan, save images, etc. Figure on about 10 minutes/slide. Having a fast PC (>2 GHz CPU) and lots of memory makes a difference also.

[Anonymous]

Here are 3 websites that should help. slidetophoto.com has just the thing you were asking about, ie, projector and digital camera. mercurynews has an article by Jim Coates, syndicated columnist on computers. andromeda site has a excellent comparison of various methods of transferring slides to photos.

http://slidetophoto.com/
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/7027276.htm?1c
http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/photo/slide-transfer.html

[Anonymous]

Thank you to all who replied to my posting. I think that having the job done for me might be the better solution. Once I have digital images made, I can manipulate them with Ulead Photo Express (up to a point). Again, thanks!

D. Warnick

[RudyRockvilleMD]

I have a hp 3970 Scanjet scanner. It will scan at 300 dpi however its resolution is better than that, 2400 dpi. It has an attachment for scanning slides.

If your slide has not faded too badly you might be able to scan it, and preserve it. Once you scan the slide you might be able to use photo software to construct a digital image.