Much faster than scanning, especially if you can tether your camera.Īnd make sure you clean the slides first. Then use a macro lens or even a lens with extension tubes, focus on the grain, and happy digitizing. With the iPad I use my scanner's slide holder raised a bit off the iPad surface you want it far enough away that the iPad pixels don't show. The light source can be a flash or lamp with diffuser I use an iPhone or iPad (there's even an app for that).

I've use an old 35mm SLR bellows and slide holder. Nikon eg makes a slide scanning lens attachment. Works just as well as the services or scanners for most 35mm slides. If you don't want to fork over for a slide scanner, and don't want to use a service, then use a camera to digitize them. If you have recommendations I would certainly appreciate any guidance on equipment, and software. I’ve has so many shipping issues with just about every carrier during the Pandemic. I’m a bit nervous about sending the slides as for professional scanning. I’ve been searching the Internet but I’m finding some are having issues with Big Sur and their scanning equipment and scanning software. I’ve found a ton of my old slides from the 70’s, and want to purchase a slide scanner that would would with either my 2015 iMac and/or 2020 M1 Mac Mini. Peripheral support has been a constant problem for MacOS across every platform and will likely only get worse in Mac ARM world, although hard to see how it could get any worse. You can learn to deal with the orange mask of color negative materials. Done properly the quality will be better than flatbed, can even be faster. But better than flatbed scanning, although even more tedious, is to use your digital SLR and appropriate optical attachments to scanograph your film originals. You can try Vuescan and see if that works for you. The control of transparency scanning in the software built into x86 macos (have not and don't plan to use ARM based MacOS) has minimal controls for and is essentially useless for transparency scanning although ok for basic document scanning. You can research why this is the case, a combination of Apple truculence and what is a tiny market for OEMs vs cost of updating software. I have not used flatbed Epson in a while but when I did Epson support for the flatbed transparency scanner I had stopped with whatever version of MacOS was in use when the scanner was first sold. Canon has not updated Canonscan since, I believe, High Sierra (could be wrong) for MacOS. That software allows full use of the transparency mode of applicable scanners. Welcome to the world of Apple peripheral support where Apple writes sort of universal drivers and OEMs abandon whatever, if any, operating software they wrote for their peripherals in a prior version of MacOS.Īn example: the Canonscan software for older Canon flat top scanners has worked/been updated for several versions of Windows.

Digital slide scanner for mac