Written by Bruce Preston, president, West Mountain Systems, Inc., long-term board member of DACS and conducted the Random

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

By my estimate, over the last 40 or so years, I have taken about 6,000 slides. Topics

include such things as family get-togethers, Formula 1 and Can-Am races at Watkins

Glen, SCCA races at Lime Rock Park, bike tours in Vermont, the U.K, Western Europe,

and steam locomotives in Colorado, Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. For all of

Unfortunately, slides also require either setting up a projector and screen or using a

hand-held viewer, and don’t easily lend themselves to sharing. Years ago I had a

Polaroid SprintScan 35 film scanner, but it required a SCSI adapter card and Polaroid

went under without delivering drivers for Windows 2000 or XP. It was also somewhat

slow taking about 2 minutes per scan. I will grant you that it delivered high quality

images. My brother in law has scanned a few slides using a flatbed scanner with a light

box cover, but the resolution was not great. It was acceptable for distributing by e-mail or

A few months ago I discovered Ion Audio’s “Slides 2 PC” 35 mm Slide and Film Scanner.

It is a nifty compact device that consists of housing containing a fixed-focus USB 2.0

camera, a white-balanced light source and a pair of carriers – one that can hold 3

mounted 35 mm slides, the other for 6-exposure 35 mm negative strips. System

requirements are minimal – Windows XP or Vista, and a USB 2 port. (If you only have

USB 1.1 you will need to add a USB 2 card to your desktop or get a USB 2 PCMCIA card

for your notebook. I tried it on my old notebook and the driver refused flatly stating that it

Slides 2 PC comes bundled with ArcSoft’s Photo Impressions 6, a consumer-friendly

image capture/editing/cataloging program commonly bundled with digital scanners and

cameras. The scanner appears as a TWAIN device, I happen to prefer the free (for

One thing I disliked about the ArcSoft package was its insistence upon loading an always

I don’t know if the device will work with a Mac – next time Scott is around with his Mac

we’ll see if it recognizes it. Since it is a TWAIN device there is a good chance as long as

Operation is simple; I’ll describe the process when using IrfanView. Select the TWAIN

source from the FILE menu, and then select ACQUIRE/BATCH. The first dialog box asks

for a target folder, a root filename, the starting number and the number of digits. I created

folder “\My Documents\My Pictures\VBT Tours\1972” as the folder, “VBT_” as the

filename root, 1 as the starting number, and 3 as the number of digits. I clicked OK and

the scanner loaded with a real-time preview. In this case of a blank white area since I

hadn’t loaded a slide. Note that since it is a video camera rather than a moving scanner

The carrier is hinged along the long side – open it, place 3 slides in the slide carrier or a

film strip in the film carrier and close it. Slide the carrier into the scanner until you feel it

click at the first positioning notch. In about a half second the image will appear, then

reappear once the auto-exposure kicks in. Tap the top of the scanner and the image is

captured to memory. A thumbnail appears above the preview image. Slide the carrier to

the next notch and repeat the process. Reload and repeat until you have up to 12

thumbnails. Click on the first, shift-click on the last one to select them all, then click on

the ‘Transfer’ button on the screen and they will be written to disk. Resultant JPEG

If you use Photo Impressions 6 as part of start up you get a configuration screen for the

scanner where you may select image size, color depth, JPEG or TIFF, and specify

whether you are scanning transparencies (slides), color or B/W negatives. IrfanView just

As far as speed is concerned, on this lazy Sunday afternoon I scanned 60 slides in 33

minutes without rushing. This included taking the slides out of the Bell & Howell ‘Slide

Cube’ and reloading them. I have yet to go into the JPEGs to rotate the images that need

to be turned from landscape to portrait orientation – IrfanView can do that with a single

Sources – I did a little web searching while wrapping up this article. The average eBay

auction over the last 60 days closed at $85 including shipping. J&R has it for $79.99 plus

shipping which I suspect will put it right about $85. If you like rolling the dice, from time to

time a factory refurb shows up on eBay at about $65.

This page is all about:  Digital Cameras .. Digital Photography Software .. Tips & Tricks

The Random Access newsletter is a Publication of “The Computer Users Group of Greeley, Colorado”  USA