I am looking for advice please on the best equipment and software to scan and digitise about 500 boxes of Kodachrome slides. I am also interested in any tips/tricks that you have for things like correcting for colours that have faded over time etc. etc.

Hi Bruce. A couple of quick comments, while I'm away from home, and more to follow when I get back in about a week's time. I have a Canon ??? scanner which I bought some years ago, which seems to do OK at this - but I haven't really tested it exhaustively. There's a couple of important points about it:
- it is a high-resolution scanner, which you'll need if you want something from the scanner that's going to give acceptable print quality output. You can do the sums to work out what you need - but 1200dpi scanning probably isn't going to give you an image that's much better than acceptable website resolution; since your original is only about 1 inch in smallest dimension, a 1200dpi scanner will only give you an image of (about) 1800 x 1200. Lots of the multi-purpose printers available these days include scanners, but you should check the specs for this carefully if you're wanting acceptable results from slide scanning.
- it has special holders for slides (and a couple of roll-film formats) that keep them aligned correctly. Without this, you run the risk of slides moving as you close the scanner lid, which will then require you to rotate the resultant scanned images to restore them to the correct orientation.

Several years ago, a couple of volunteers scanned a selection of slides from the old BOCA slide collection. Subsequent examination of these reveals that there are colour problems with most of them; we've not yet had any resources to devote to checking this and correcting them. My opinion is that it's highly likely that you'll need to do this with any old source material (I've had to do so with scanned old photo prints); the correction is likelt to be the same for all, so image processing software that allows you to do batch processing - applying the same "recipe" to lots of images - will be something that you'll need.

Rob

The reason why I made this post is that a few years ago, I had about 200 slides to digitise. Most places quoted me $3 per slide. I managed to negotiate a better deal with someone I knew but the colour was "sub-optimal". I went to a retail outlet last week and they recommended: QPIX Photo Standalone Film and Print Scanner $139.00 To be fair, they let me take it home for a trial. I returned it 2 days later and received a full refund. Other products in their catalogue are: QPIX Film Scanner FS-01 $68.88; QPIX Negative Slide Converter $143.00; and Epson Perfection Photo Scanner V800 $999.00 The best alternative that I have come across is: CanoScan 9000F Mark II $349.00. It is rated as: 9600 x 9600 dpi professional film, photo, slide and document scanner with a scan speed of 7 seconds. Does anyone have any experience with any of these products please?