If you have boxes of slides stacked on closet shelves in your home, you’re not alone. Preserving photographs on slides was very popular at one time. With a slide projector and a screen or blank wall, you were all set to entertain family and friends for hours with pictures of your latest family excursions or events. Over time, your collection of slides grew, and you may have inherited even more slides from other family members. If you know where your slide projector is, there is a good chance that it’s broken or that you just can’t find the time to bring it out and set up the slide carousel for an hour or two of reminiscing. If you don’t want to lose the treasured memories contained in your slides but find keeping your slides and projector a nuisance, consider scanning your slides. Here are some of the reasons you might find this to be the perfect solution for you.

Scanning slides is easy. You can buy your own slide scanner and complete this project in your spare time. Others in your family can help, too, which will make the scanning process more fun and less time consuming. Slide scanners are available in stores and online in a wide range of prices.

You can easily carry your photographs with you. When you scan your slides, they can be transferred to CD’s or DVD’s. You’ll be able to carry hundreds of pictures on a few thin, lightweight disks. If you want to take them to view somewhere else, it won’t be a problem.

You can keep your pictures organized any way you like. Your slides might be grouped together according to the year they were taken, the locations, the people in the photographs, or some other categorization. If you own a large collection of slides, you know how easy it is to misplace a slide or drop a box of them, leading to a jumbled mess. When you scan your slides, you can choose which photographs go on each CD or DVD. You can label the disks, making it easy for you to locate favorite shots.

You can improve the quality of your photographs. Slides tend to collect dust and other particles, and they can be accidently scratched. The color on slides will fade over time. Scanning slides enables you to enhance the quality of the photograph by adding color to the photographs and covering up any scratches or other marks on the slides. You can also crop the photographs to focus more on the subjects in the pictures and exclude unnecessary background areas.

About thirty-five to forty years ago, 35mm slides were quite popular. Families documented their vacations and special occasions with series of slides, businesses used slide shows for important presentations, and students learned about faraway places and science from slide shows. Each slide was placed, in order and in the correct orientation, into the slide carousel, and the show began.

Image technology has come a long way since the 60’s and 70’s. PowerPoint presentations, digital cameras, and photographs on CD’s and DVD’s are used for displaying pictures and presentations. Many people have boxes and cases full of old 35mm slides that sit gathering dust because viewing the slides is too cumbersome or the slide projector is broken. Fortunately, slides can now be converted to a digital format onto CD’s and DVD’s for easy storage and viewing with slide scanning.

You can use a flatbed scanner or a film scanner to scan your slides. Film scanners can range in price from $300 to over $1,000, but they produce a higher quality reproduction. Some of the scanner features you need to consider before making a purchase are resolution, DPI, PPI, dynamic range, and bit depth.

The resolution of a scanned image is the measurement of how sharp, or clear, the scanned image is. The DPI, or dots per inch, is the measurement of the number of image dots a printer is capable of printing into 2.54cm (one linear inch) of space. A higher DPI typically results in a higher resolution. Pixel, a combination of the words “picture” and “element,” is a term that refers to the smallest unit of an image. This is typically a color dot. The number of pixels a scanner supports (megapixels) and the size of the image produced determine the PPI, or pixels per inch. As the size of an image increases, the PPI decreases. Scanners with higher megapixels produce images with higher resolution. Dynamic range refers to the capability of distinguishing levels of brightness in an image. A low dynamic range results in a blurry, undefined image, and a high dynamic range produces a sharp, crisp image. Bit depth, or color depth, is the measurement of how many bits, or single units of information, are used to create each pixel in a digital image. Higher bit depths result in brighter and deeper image colors.

There are some drawbacks to do-it-yourself slide scanning. As mentioned previously, the cost of a quality scanner may be prohibitive. You may also end up with a scanner that is difficult to operate or does not perform as you expected. Common problems of scanning slides at home or at your business are damage from fingerprints, choosing the appropriate settings on the scanner, and difficulty producing pictures without scratches and other unsightly marks. Slide scanning used to be a very time-consuming process but with the latest models it is a breeze!