I don't find the slide carrier on the V500 that flimsy, considering the simple task it has. For color negatives, though, all the snapping in and out is more tedious.

The V500 comes with a separate negative holder for 2 1/4 negatives.

I've found it an adequate performer overall for the task at hand. I too find it odd that one slide/neg has preserved its colour well, while the adjacent one might be faded beyond salvage.

I've shown these before, and the top one is severely cropped, but they were from a few very dirty negs that had been kicking around all my life. I'd never seen them as positives until getting a scanner.

They were taken by a concertina Kodak, I'm sure, bottom of the range. You can see on the second one, some flowers on my mum's frock that are in focus. The further out, the worst distortion. But, it does show the ability to search back into the past without masses of expensive kit.

What I have noticed, and it's obvious really, is that the photos taken with my Aunt's camera, a scaled up model of my mother's, are markedly better.

I try to find the negs to check the surface area ratio - but it's not doubled by any means.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...MSBWRBcrop.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...rphotocopy.jpg

Again, getting back to scanning thousands of slides. That's a daunting task, and I would do the masses by sitting with the camera remote in one hand, the carousel control in the other. Odds are I could control the camera with the same hand I was holding my wineglass in.

When the bulk was safely away, I would then use the the T/V to view and pick out the ones worthy of a proper scan.

The screens I have are not up to perfect copies, but they really do bring to life the overall benefits of slides. I don't know if new reflective screens are still available. Maybe, a projector tele screen might give good quality.

I didn't bother with selecting slides, I just loaded them and set it off. Arranging them was easy - each box is numbered, and the software saves them all into a directory of my choice with a prefix and starting number for the file name also of my choice. So box 52 went into folder S52, and the file names were all prefixed S52.

It does run afterwards, but you have to tell the scanner software you want it running before you start scanning. So, the scanner scans the slide with all 4 channels (see below), the software picks up the information and processes it, then it saves the image file.

An ICE scanner has a 4th channel - IR - and the information from that tells the software where there are scratches and dust. The software fills those in from the surrounding pixels, and makes a very good job of it. Unfortunately the residual silver in a lot of Kodachrome, and in B&W, messes up the information from the IR channel so you get dud results using ICE on them. Unfortunately the card mounts that old Kodachrome often has sheds dust like crazy.

Bushfiva - Thanks for the lead to Hamrick Vuescan. It looks interesting. I'll examine it in more detail to see if it fits my needs.

Hamrick Vuescan

Seriously good software

In addition, generous licence terms and excellent support.

Mac