scanning film in bulk

[peene.biber]

You are late, most of us have done it in the past.
I feel this article did not help so much, why?
1. Old films do have a lot of problems and I bought the same hardware but endet up with individually adjusting each old slide. A lot of slides will be deleted, they need to be getting names and search items etc. But most of them have individual scratches  or color shifting...
2. Buying old hardware for  more than 1000$ and being careful about the software costs looks for my feeling not very logical or sponsored by vuescan.
3. I sold the old Nikon hardware later and I scanned the last films with a Plustek OpticFilm 8200i bought in a bundle with Silverfast AI, a software I bought also for the Nikon scanner. This was much much less expensive and a current hardware with a very good software, I personally preferred to Vuescan which I have been using too for evaluation.
So finally , for a lot of slides it will be very late if not too late because of film problems. I tried bulk processing too but needed to shift to processing single slides one by one and adjusting settings. Thats my impression

[David S]

So far I have tried the scanning route for older slides (several thousand) and have switched to using a slide dup. attachment with a macro lens attached to my Olympus camera. I can copy well over 100 slides an hour doing a slide box of some 500-600 in two two-hour sessions. Then I have the RAW files to work on, remove dust, correct colours (some are from the late 40s and early 50s etc.

Dave S

[BradSmith]

I started down this same road, but quickly realized that scanning an archive of thousands and thousands of images, four or five at a time "in bulk --- bulk???  HaH!"  would probably take me the rest of my life to do.  How long would that Nikon scanner take to scan the 5 images in the neg film strip at "archive" resolution?  A wild guess -80 sec sec each???, so say five negative strip = 400 sec or nearly 7 minutes.  Add in a minute to take the strip out of the sleeve and load it, a minute to put those negs back into their sleeve, and we're up to 9 minutes.  So every hour, he can maybe do maybe 35 negs per hour.  He said he had about 10,000 negatives.   That is 285 hours.  If you did this every evening for three hours, it would take you 95 days - over 3 months to finish.  And then you'd have those 10,000 to 15,000 slides to tackle! 

I had about 12,000 slides and negs.  I sent them to a scanning service named Scan Cafe who scanned them in India for, as I remember, about $2,000.  I received 4000 dpi scans of acceptable quality in about 5 weeks.  The ones that I may want to print and frame in larger size, I'll rescan myself on my Konica-Minolta scanner and really work them in the scanning software and Photoshop/Lightroom. 

Life is too short and photography is too important to me, to spend months and months turning something that I love, ie, photography into pure unadulterated drudgery.