Video Slide Scanners & Viewers

Slide Scanner

The common desktop scanner analyzes and digitizes an image of an object by shining a bright light onto it from below, which then reflects back off the object onto a moving sensor bar. The object is visible to the computer because it reflects light. Most desktop scanners come with special inserts for scanning photographic slides, usually a simple sheet of cardboard or plastic with a hole in the center for inserting the slides. However, photographic slides are transparent, meaning that this method will not work as well as it could, and there’s no easy way to scan a photographic negative. A dedicated slide scanner, on the other hand, works from the other way around, projecting light from one side of the slide through it and onto a digital scanner placed on the opposite side. These devices can easily be used to produce large, high-quality digital versions of photographic slides, as well as photographic negatives.

Slide Viewer

A Slide Viewer works on the same principle as a slide scanner. A light is projected through the slide onto a scanner, which is then digitized, producing an image of the picture on the slide. The difference is that while a slide scanner is meant to create a copy of the picture for long-term storage and archiving, a slide viewer instead projects the picture directly onto a video screen. It’s not really all that different than a common slide projector, except with the options of saving the slides to a computer and of projecting negatives.

Best Slide Scanner

For most people, any common flatbed scanner would sufficient to digitize slides. They will produce a perfectly adequate image of the slide that should serve most people’s purposes, provided that they don’t need any kind of extreme high-quality resolution images. For those who do, it’s naturally better to find a dedicated slide scanner. However, only the really expensive, higher-end models, such as the Nikon Coolscan V ED ($600), produce images that are much noticeably better than the budget models. Many have even been shown to produce images of a lower quality than mid-range flatbed models. In addition, a flatbed scanner can as many as eight or ten slides at once, whereas most slide scanners only allow one slide to be scanned at a time, although some models, like the Pacific Image Electronics PF3650 Pro3, can scan an entire roll of film negatives at once. However, a certain advantage that slide scanners have over flatbed scanners is speed. Their scans take far less time than a flatbed scanner, allowing more to be done with less.