35m slides to Mac

I have just been trawling through my Mums garage and found a load of slides from when my Grandparents were my age. I want to get them into digital format onto my mac, but some of the reviews of the slide scanners are appalling.

Can any one recommend a good cost effective reliable product (less than 100 slides to do)?
Has anyone seen these Opteka HD² Digtal Slide Duplicator for Pentax K10D, K20D ?

or would somebody hire one out?

Many thanks in anticipation... I know some kind member will have the answer.

Jon

Mind you I have just tried a daylight balanced tube behind the slide held by a soldering clamp and photographed it with my 50mm macro lens. Not perfect but cheap!

Especially for slide scanners the cheaper ones really produce crap results.

The cheapest way to get a decent quality are the Epson Perfection V500 and V700.

I have an CanoScan 8000F - about 3 years old with a specific holder for slides. It allows you to preview scan four at once and then select which ones you want a full scan of after automatically separating them.

It is now obsolete but the 8800F is the replacement - around £150 and is complete with film and slide holders.

I have a Minolta film scanner, the Dimage Scan Dual IV. I recommend it and there are a few on eBay right now.

I purchased one of the Jessops cheap slide scanners some time ago, the resolution was good enough for a 7 x5 print off a slide. And I got quite acceptable results from slides taken in the 60's. The scanner was slow only being able to scan one slide at the time and the holder did not like glass mounted or the old Agfa CT18 plastic mounts. I gave mine away to the local charity shop and brought an Epsom 4490 to scan more at one time and also some 35mm and 120 negatives.

You might sometimes see the scanner going cheap and from memory the software was Mac compatible.

I've had a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II and a Nikon Coolscan IV.
Both very good - especially if you use Ed Hamrick's "VueScan" software. The software makes all the difference - especially for batch scanning slides

Matt

Here is a slide I photographed with the daylight tube and macro lens.
I wonder how much better the quality would be through a scanner?

Be carefull buying some of the older used slide scanners. there was a minolta one in my local camera store and when I checked it it was not compatable with VISTA only XP. some may not be compatable with XP but only older progs. CHEERS Vic.

Most of the compatibility issues can be resolved with the VueScan software Some older scanners used SCSI for connection (and you may have trouble getting Vista drivers for an old SCSI card). But apart from that, with Vuescan you should get better control and better compatibility
www.hamrick.com

Matt