Slides to DVD/CD?

Well, you could buy a flat bed scanner that will also scan negatives or slides or you could buy a dedicated film scanner. Minolta has a new film scanner for $299 list. You could get a decent flat bed for $150 - $200 but the scan quality won't be as good. Here's a link to a review of the Minolta DiMage Scan Dual III. I don't have one yet but plan to buy one in the next month or so.

http://www.photographic.com/showarchives.cgi?178

You could then burn the files to a cd or dvd, with the appropriate burner of course. You may also want to invest in some image management software such as ThumbsPlus, ACDSee, Jasc After Shot, Ulead Photo Explorer or Adobe Photoshop Album to help keep track of all your images and build slideshows. I like ACDSee myself. It's a powerful, full featured program that I haven't had a bit of trouble with and is reasonably priced. Most of the manufacturers have free trials that you can download and try.

Which ever route you go will be time consuming. Unless you have someone do it for you and that will be expensive. Much more so than buying the equipment and doing it yourself. With either type of scanner you will have a fixture that you load four or five slides into and then scan. You can buy another of the fixtures so you could have another loaded and ready to go when the first scans are done. It's just a matter of opening the holder and dropping in your mounted slides or negative strips, closing it and then placing in the scanner but it will be a slow process. With the Minolta scanner you'll also want to install a USB 2.0 card in your comp to speed up the scan process. It will work with USB 1.1 but will be slower.

The Minolta comes with software to help with color correction or faded images as well as software to help remove dust from the scanned images.

To have someone do it could cost into the thousands depending on the number of slides and the degradation of them.

Your best bet would be to buy a film scanner off ebay used to do your scanning yourself and use photoshop to toucn 'em up.

I just sold my film scanner (Nikon LS4000ED, best on the market) as I just purchased my Canon 10D. (lovely camera) Anyway, I have years of scanning pictures from neg/slids and it is quite boring! but worth it.

However the cost of film, etc is prohibitive. But back to your question. I still have thousands of frames I still need to scan and at even a dollar a scan (most charge 5.00 scan and up depending on resolution desired).

If you have a lot you might be able to get a volume discount from a local guy. Try your camera clubs as they may very well have folks in there that own scanners.

If you purchase one it will cost around 1500. new for a decent one.

Good luck!

Just something I've heard but really don't have any knowledge of otherwise but I believe you can get a scanner or scanner attachment for slides. I don't know what the quality would be like but once scanned it's an easy load to CD.

Your best bet is to look for a business that specializes in photofinishing. I don't believe the super stores (Meijer, Wal-Mart, Target, etc.) offer this service in house or through their take out services. You can convert your slides to negatives and then onto CD's, but that would degrade the quality of the images. I have contacted a couple of local businesses that can burn the slide images onto a CD, but the cost was kind of high. If you can find a cheaper alternative, let me know because I want to do the same thing.