The magic that isn't.
In a courageous attempt to put some of my terrible pics on the web, I bought an HP 6200 scanner in mid 1998 because of the fairly high resolution and a "slide attachment", which turned out to be a plastic pyramid with a mirror in it. This was a moderately expensive white elephant as it took forever to clean up the terrible quality scans of dust and so on. I still have this and use it for flatbed stuff, but probably should sell it and buy a $50 one.
In late '98 I bought a cheap/refurbished/second hand Tamarack slide scanner from a dodgy auction website. You load up 4 slides into a magazine and it sucks them through and stores them in BMP format for you. Image quality was OK, although dark (night shots) aren't the best, it's not super fast, and often the colours are flat and noisy, especially with darker shades. After a couple of years, the image quality was getting worse, with visible banding on the scans.
In June 2001 I got a flash CanoScan 4000 slide scanner after getting fed up with the deteriorating Tamarack. It's good. Really good. I'd rather pump negatives through this baby than scan prints on the crappy HP.
I usually scan in the good pics at 4000 dpi with the FARE/ICE dust setting 'on' which virtually eliminates the need to clean up dust and small scratches on slides. I save these in TIFF format and then in Photoshop (the freebee LE version came with the scanner), crop, resize to 800 pixels wide (or 600 tall), sharpen, adjust colours if required, edit if necessary and then save as Jpegs. I burn the lot to CD for storage.
Once the images are done, ThumbsPlus is used to generate the thumbnail images and build a skeleton webpage which is then tweaked using MS FrontPage or by hand.
I'm working my way slowly through the
slide collection in this manner now. There are still plenty of crappy scans to
be found on this website, so you can try to guess which ones were produced by
which scanner.
Of course moving to digital means that processing this stuff is much faster -
firstly because you don't have to do the scanning thing, but also you don't have
to wait for your films to be developed, so can start editing as soon as you download the pics
from the card over lunch at Subway.