I had forgotten about the dust!

Even worse when it was under a glass mount.

Gordon

Thanks for all your comments which were very helpfull. Here is my
progress.

Before posting I tried placing a slide on a flatbed scanner (cheap
umax)  which achieved no picture. Shining a neon light on top while on
a flatbed had little effect. And building shiny white paper prism
shaped pyramids to reflect the scanners light back down onto the slide
which acheived something just about recognisable if your squinted and
used you imagination a bit. But nothing remotely useable.

Since posting, inspired partly by the suggestion to look at add ons
for a digital camera I have looked at devices like
http://www.dcresource.com/SlideCopier/index.html and tried to immitate
the princibles. I have tried holding a slide up against the light,
backed by a translucent piece of tupperware plastic, and zooming in
with a macro lense which achieved a picture ok for emailing though not
fantastic.

I then found our slide projector actually has a proper little light
box behind a hatch at the back and placed a slide on that and zoomed
in with the macro and actually achieved an ok result. It is not as
sharp as the original and the colour is perhaps a little off but not
bad for general use. Feel faintly foolish for not thinking of
something so simple before. When I have tried holding a slide up to
the light before the camera just shot right through it. Decent backing
is clearly the trick.

My mother, a more decisive consumer than I, marched into Jessops when
she was in town yesterday and purchased one of the primefilm scanner
1800u  for £99 with 30 days approval. The results were better than
with the macro lense but not as much you might assume. Unfortunatly we
then discovered that our slides are not a standard 35mm by 24mm but
37mm by 37mm square. This problem had not occured to us and means the
scanner chopped off a chunk of slide. So we sent it back... Comments
suggest that with more time to play around with it I would have
achieved better yet results. As it was the slides looked a bit washed
out but more detailed. The dust did become very obvious.

We also now have a neat jessops slide viewer which is a little light
box behind a magnifying glass which works quite well. Tried useing the
digital camera on it and achieved much warmer colour but not quite as
good detail as just using a plain lighbox.

So in brief
Flatbed scanner with no attatchment pretty useless
Camera with macro lense (fuji 602) actually not bad, adequate.
£99 film scanner best yet but not by a huge margin.

And I am open to suggestions on scanning non standard size slides. For
the moment I will just do a macro lense shot of each but it would be
nice to do it properly. Are flatbeds more versitile? I may wait a year
or too and try and pick up the new epson with "ice" for dust cheap.
Hmm.

Thanks for all thoughts, very helpfull.