Save Your Non-digital Pictures With A 35mm Slide Scanner

Even in this era, people often keep their photos inside their closets, forgetting they could lighten them up with the present day technology. Especially the elderly cherish and enjoy memories of olden times, the 35mm slide scanner allows them to bring back those memories to life and savor those photos yet again.

Think about a slide scanner

Though it's equally possible to use a flatbed scanner, the result is significantly better every time a dedicated photo scanner is needed because it makes the steps involved in storing and printing images faster than before. By using a dedicated film and slide scanner makes scanning and transferring those precious images to your computer easier and quicker.

Different types of Slide Scanners

You will get different sizes and types of photo slide scanner today and each one will come with 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. Basic types of scanners include the flatbed scanner that's competent to scan documents and images plus the dedicated slide scanner that is the subject of our article.

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. You have to decide exactly what you need your scanner to do as this will be your preliminary guide when searching for a scanner. To restore old slides and family pictures then a mid price item should do the job well enough. A good start would be online with comparison chart that reveals price, models and a basic comparison of features.

Using Your Scanner

The scanner and the software come as a unit, and you have to insert the software CD in your computer's CD drive as this enables you to load and work with your images. Once the software CD is loaded you need to open the file and choose the source or type of scan, if you are working with slides for example, you simply click on the positive color film and the scan will start. While scanning you will see a preview of the imagethat can be edited before you complete the scan, if you're not pleased with the image.

If you are going to scan old slides and films then the first thing you have to do is make sure that the images are clean and free from dust. To make it easier to locate images after they have been scanned and stored, you need to follow the same pattern for storing them and name then with date or subject etc. You can actually also sort your categorized slides by thickness in order to avoid changing the scanner settings often.

You need to make sure your 35mm slide scanner is set to the suggested resolution of 300 dpi as this gives a much better quality image. The more the resolution, the more time is take for an image. If you use a Mac the files which are scanned can be saved in TIF and as BMP for a Windows based PC. Larger files should be saved as TIF on both a PC and a Mac.