Transfer photos or slides to cd

[MeMe]

I have a LOT of slides and photos that I would like to transfer to CD's, I know there is equipment to do so, but would prefer to purchase something that someone has experience with and not some generic unknown item that I recently found. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I prefer not to take the items to a service since I have so many and this would cost way more than my unemployed, college student pockets can afford at the moment.
Thanks in advance for your help

MeMe

[Bonish Photo]

Might want to rethink your line of stradegy.

My family has been in photography for 3 generations and needless to say, we've accumlated an amazing amount of pictures. I too wanted to transfer all of them to digital format so I went out and bought the best negative scanner I could find. At the time it was a Nikon something or other, but their top of the line model that would allow me to feed in a strip of negatives, or a slide and scan it at amazing resolution. After my first week I knew I had made a mistake.

To do this, each negative strip, with 4 photos per strip took around a half hour!

In other words it would take me a few years to complete this task. I had a friend who wanted to do some work on photos of his family for a project, so I sold him the scanner taking a slight bath on the $500 price.

I went and bought a high end flatbed scanner. One that will allow me to lay 10-12 negative strips, or 4-5 pictures on the glass and copy them all at once. What this allowed me to do is copy an entire roll of film as one image if I was doing the negatives. Talking with my friend at a later date, he joked with me that if he would have known how long the process took, he wouldnt have bought the scanner from me, and would have went the same route I did.

Now, my Uncle, who is a working professional in realestate photography and portrait work has told me, and you're probably going to laugh at this, that the local wal-mart near his store will scan all your slides/photos for you for a price that is so cheap, it would be stupid for you to do it yourself. I'm not sure if every wal-mart has this service, because I know the one near my house doesnt have a photo lab like the one near his house, but you could probably shop around and find a place that would do all your stuff and hand you a few cds/dvds for under the price of what it would cost to buy a scanner yourself.

Here is the way I look at it. If I can buy something that takes up a lot of my time to get something done, or find someone to do the job for me for the same price, and have all that time to be out taking pictures, then I go with the option that keeps me out taking pictures. TIme is money, and something most of us have little of both. Use your time and your money wisely.

I now have a $75 Canon flatbed scanner that I keep around to use as a copy machine and scanner if I need to scan something, and it suits me fine. Once you start scanning things, you'll pretty upset with the quality of your product, unless you do a ton work in photoshop. I've only used 1 or 2 scans of all the 1000's of images I took. I do like the fact that I have all our photos digitized and on a hard drive, they're fine for the new photo frames that you cant really tell detail in like on a computer monitor.

Hope that helps.

[MeMe]

Yes, that does help. Being able to post questions and having those with experience answer honestly totally helps out.
Thanks so much for the information.

MeMe

[gldiana]

There are many photography shops in the country that will do the work for you at small cost (around 40 cents per image or less). I suggest you Google around. You'll need to send them the photos/negatives and they'll do all the scanning and CD/DVD burning and then mail everything back to you.