Slide Converter – Your Guide

If you’re like many people, you probably have several boxes of old negatives and slides sitting in your garage, attic or a closet, gathering dust.

And as for the old slide projector, who knows if it works any more – or even its location? But you can’t throw the slides away. So what to do with them?

The best answer: preserve those memories by transferring them to digital form. Fortunately, this is not only possible, but it’s easy with slide converters.

A digital slide converter turns your old 35mm slides and negatives into a 21st century digital picture library. A good slide converter will scan your slides with a single touch and then connect to your desktop or notebook computer via a USB cable.

While digital slide converters will produce a wide variety of photo resolutions, the best choice is one which produces 5 mega pixel resolution images.

For many of the slide converter models, you simply pull your 35mm slides out of their box and place them (or photo negatives) into a tray, which aligns them properly. You then press a scan button on the slide converter, and in a matter of seconds, the image is scanned and turned into a digital image.

Slide converters (sometimes known as a ‘slide and negative converter’ and a ‘slide to digital converter’) work via a CMOS sensor.

A 5 mega-pixel 35mm slide converter can scan images up to 1,800 dots per inch (dpi). Once the slides have been scanned, you transfer the new digital photos by plugging your USB cable into the converter, with the other end plugged into your computer’s USB port.

Either Windows XP or Vista will instantly pull up the images on your screen. You can then use photo-editing software to crop, edit, resize, or touch up the pictures.

And of course, if you have photo paper for your printer, you can then turn these images back into hard-copy pictures, and place them in your house in your favorite picture frames.

Sure, the ‘ol 35mm slide projector or a slide viewer still does have its place in certain scenarios, but you can achieve the ultimate flexibility with your slides and pictures when they’re in digital format!

The slide converter – the best way to preserve your priceless memories! If you’d like to read about a couple specific models, we discuss the Plustek OpticFilm 7200 scanner and Pacific Image ImageBox slide converter on the next pages.