35mm Slide Scanner - How to Use it to Back Up Your Non-Digital Photos

Even today, many individuals have their images in drawers and cupboards rather than their systems. Elderly people, enjoy and relish olden times specially and the 35mm scanner helps them to bring those moments back to life once again.

Slide scanner does the difference

While it is possible to use an all in one flatbed scanner, you will get an improved result by using a dedicated photo slide scanner, which would make storing and printing images faster than before. With a dedicated film and slide scanner scanning and transferring your images to your system becomes easy and quick.

Types of Slide Scanners

Photo scanner come in different sizes and models and few include the manufacturer's software. A scanner's software is very important as it is the software that allows you to edit, save and store your pictures on a computer. The flat bed scanner that scans documents as well as images and the dedicated slide scanner which we are reviewing here are the two major types of scanners.

Polaroid, Nikon and HP are the leading manufacturers of Photo Slide Scanners and the price varies from moderate to high, determined by your requirements and liking. When you're thinking of buying a scanner, your basic guide on making a choice should be surrounding the requirements you are looking at from it. If you are just looking to scan the old pictures then a moderately priced one should be OK. A straightforward search online can provide lots of info and there are sites which compare different rates for various models too.

Slide scanner in operation

Since the scanner and the software come together, it's mostly plug and play where you insert the disk to your drive and begin editing your pictures. Once you load the software from the CD, choose the source or type of scan after opening the file, for eg: if it's a slide then choose positive color film and the scan will start. After you scan, you can see a preview of the image which can be edited if needed before you decide to complete the scan.

If you are likely to scan old slides and films then the first thing you need to do is make sure that the images are clean and free from dust. Finalize on your strategy when it comes to saving the images so you'll be able to remember, e.g. by date or subject cause this will make finding easier if they are scanned and stored. You can actually also sort your categorized slides by thickness in order to avoid changing the scanner settings often.

Also for a 35mm slide scanner, ensure you set it to the recommended resolution of 300 dpi to get better quality image. Keep in mind that if you enhance the resolution, you also increase the time it takes to scan the image. Small files that you scan can be saved as BMP for a Windows based PC and TIF for a MAC. Regardless of it being a PC or Mac, the files must be saved as TIF if they are huge.