Have a few decades worth of 35mm slides I want to convert over to digital, including Kodachromes which I understand can cause problems with some of the film scanners - models under consideration include the old & new Minolta 5400's, the Nikon Coolscan V, 5000 & 9000 (the latter of which is rumoured to be one of the few that will correctly scan Kodachrome with ICE/GEM/ROC & all the other goodies turned on, but don't need the large format capability (& price) and not sure if it will take a slide feeder (several thousand slides by hand is not something I am interested in doing)

so... anyone have any thoughts or inside scoop on anything coming down the pike? Flatbeds are nice but they still are a ways from matching optical quality (even if claimed resolution is higher)

Have you priced getting them scanned by a lab?  If you can do it that way and get nice drum scans, might be the way to go...

Far too many to have someone else scan them, literally thousands of slides.

I use a Minolta Scan Dual III. I bought it about three months before the Scan Dual IV came out. Oops! The IV has a few features I'd like to have- the media trays are nicer. At any rate, it has been a pretty good investment so far. The only feature it lacks that I'd really like to have is Digital ICE. I've scanned a ton of Kodachrome slides on it so far.

Here are two cropped images taken from 1960s slides:





Galland

The ICE ( & ROC & GEM & all the other acronym soup features) seem to save a lot of time (rather than fixing stuff in photoshop) but Kodachrome doesn't get along with it in all scanners (from what I have read)

Lots of discussions on it with no clear answers yet (AFAIK)

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00AqYq

http://www.nikonians.org/dcforum/DCForumID81/808.html#0

http://www.filmscanner.info/Kodachrome.html

From what I can gather, the Coolscan V & 5000 sometimes work, the Minolta 5400 may or may not, and the Coolscan 5000 does (but is $$$$$ and doesn't offer batch scanning - I think)

Not sure when new models are rolled out, but would love to get a 9000 at a healthy discount, else am still uncertain...


ETA: Even the ASF site shows DIGITAL ICE Professional Technology optimized for Kodachrome is only on the Nikon 9000...

Quoted: ETA: Even the ASF site shows DIGITAL ICE Professional Technology optimized for Kodachrome is only on the Nikon 9000...

Yep. For $1799.95 (B&H Photo) I think I'll pass. Good grief!

I'd say spring for it.  You NEED ICE if you are going to do lots of scanning.  You won't believe how much crud is on your slides (even the clean ones).

Quoted: I use a Minolta Scan Dual III. I bought it about three months before the Scan Dual IV came out. Oops! The IV has a few features I'd like to have- the media trays are nicer. At any rate, it has been a pretty good investment so far. The only feature it lacks that I'd really like to have is Digital ICE. I've scanned a ton of Kodachrome slides on it so far. Here are two cropped images taken from 1960s slides: home.ec.rr.com/galland/slides/img_032.jpg home.ec.rr.com/galland/slides/img_038.jpg Galland

ROC would have been good for these photos too.