I'm in the same situation - I have inherited literally thousands slides from avid photographers who traveled the world. There are not only pictures of their travels, but lots of photos of us kids at various stages through life.

I finally got the money together to invest in a slide scanner. Mine is a Konica Minolta DiMage Dual IV. It cost about $225 if I remember correctly, and scans at 3200 dots per inch. You need really high resolution (much more than inexpensive paper scanners that typically have less than 1000 dpi) because 35mm slides are so small.

The holder that came with the scanner has space for four slides, and there's an automatic feed mechanism that advances and aligns the slides with the scanner.

The biggest problem with slide scanning is the dust. It looks like big black splotches and streaks across the image. There's software that came with the scanner that helps remove it, and it does a good job, but it's a manual process and quite slow. I understand that if I'd spent a couple hundred more dollars I could have bought a scanner with "Digital ICE" that takes care of this fairly quickly and painlessly. Unfortunately, it wasn't in the budget.

But if I take the time, the pictures come out *great*. They look much better than the slides! The scanner software allows me to tweak various values and dramatically improve the quality of the photos. They look like new.

So it's worth my time to pick out the best of my father's and grandfather's slides and run them through the scanner and Photoshop. Everybody loves the results. We're going to make photo books (Karen hand-sews and binds them) for Christmas presents for our family.

Dave and Karen in Salem, Oregon