I sent email recently to RBmail asking if anyone had converted old 35mm slides to digital and was surprised that Ruth Barbour offered to let me use her converter. On second thought she said she no longer needed it since she had converted all her slides and suggested I keep it. I accepted the offer on the condition that it would become community property once I had finished using it since I'm sure other River Benders probably have 35mm slides like me. I found that I had over 1000 slides in old Kodak carousel trays and my projector bulb was burned out. This article is intended to tell you how the conversion went.

The first thing I did was install the software which was a driver for the converter and a PhotoImpression program. The converter was a Hammacher Schlemmer model which connected to my PC via a USB-2 cable. The manual said it worked only with Window XP and Vista. Only one problem occurred during installation which required me to install Direct X Version 9 because it wouldn't work with my later Version 11 in Vista.

The conversion process was simple but time consuming. The routine consisted of placing 3 slides in a plastic holder that slides into the converter to be scanned one at a time. After doing this 4 times for a total of 12 slides the photos must be saved in a folder in your computer or the next slides scanned will overwrite them. This slow process can take over an hour to scan a whole Kodak carousel tray of 80 slides.

After scanning slides the next task was editing them. My slides were up to 47 years old and frankly I was surprised that they came out as well as they did. Most have a bluish cast probably from age but which can be improved from editing and many need cropping to eliminate black borders caused when scanning. The PhotoImpression program that came with the converter has editing capabilities but I used my PaintShop Pro program to edit the few slide photos I plan to embed in my life story that I've been working on for years. I'll let family members edit the ones they intend to keep and delete the rest.

The last problem was how to get the 1000+ converted slides to family members out of state. I thought of putting them on a CD and making copies but finally decided that since they all had high-speed Internet I would send them photos in batches by email. Windows Image Resizer reduced them to around 70Kbytes each, a reasonable size for sending by email. They all agreed to my plan and it went well sending them 30-50 photos at a time. This led to a lot of reminiscing by email.

For those wishing to use the converter for a couple weeks please note that I don't plan to provide technical assistance since the manual is available on the CD.

All my previous computer articles since 1998 are online at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/dwindex.htm