Document Scanning Tips for Photo Slides

The best vaccine against damaged documents and photos is to scan and back them up digitally, before disaster strikes. That way, there’s no need to worry about a storm or flood destroying irreplaceable images or information.

Scanning photos is time-consuming yet relatively straightforward – but what about slides? Many schools, libraries, museums and other organizations still keep images stored in the old-school slide format, which can be trickier to scan. Experienced document scanning services can be an invaluable asset in helping you transfer your images into digital storage, as they have the expertise to handle virtually any type of scanning.

Here’s a look some of the options for scanning slides:

• Slide duplicator: A slide duplicator is a device you can attach to a digital SLR camera in place of the lens to take a “picture” of each slide. This method is relatively inexpensive, quick and easy to use. However, the quality of the digital images is generally poorer than with a scanner – image cropping, loss of shadow detail and lower resolution are common.
• Flatbed scanner: Flatbed scanners do a surprisingly decent job with slides, particularly if you choose a model that is designed to scan slides and negatives in addition to paper photos. However, you may need an extra transparency adapter attachment (although some scanners come with these), and you’ll definitely want to use quality scanning software that gives you plenty of control over the final result.
• Slide scanner: A slide scanner will deliver the highest-quality scans, but at a premium cost. However, the expense may be justifiable if you’ve got a huge volume of slides to scan.
• Document scanning services: To avoid the guesswork and make the process easier, you can always hire a document scanning services company to handle your slide collection. That way, you don’t have to put in the time, and you can rest assured that you’ll get quality scans.

[ Photo by: jhritz, via CC License ]