There are actually some scanner groups, Mirsky, where they may be a
little more up on the subject, that is if you don't get a good
response here.

alt.comp.periphs.scanner
comp.periphs.scanner

This vendor will give you an idea how much scanning that volume would cost:

http://www.discountdigitalart.com/slides.html

Probably a good idea to let them do it rather than buying a scanner. IMHO

Jim Waggener

I don't know what your time is worth or what level of technical skills
you have but I was in the same situation.  I purchased a Nikon Coolscan
V ED on eBay for about $550, worked all summer scanning the slides -
shared the unit with a buddy who then did the same.  We then resold the
unit on Bay for almost what we paid for it $500 or so - total cost in
dollars was nil but it DOES take a lot of time.  Results were excellent,
though.

In article
<mirsky-537EB0.14182224042006@sn-radius.vsrv-sjc.supernews.net>,

If your mother is "well to do" take the store.  the cost will be many
times the cost of a slide scanner.

But, if she is bored and would like to re-live the content of the slides
one at a time, buy her a Nikon Cool Scan V and set her to work.  
Needless to say, the results of this method will certainly reduce her
credit card bills!

In either case, the need to "edit' some of the picts using PSE will be
about the same.  Altho, the disks from the "photo scanning company" will
be on CD or DVD and thus constitute a back-up that she will not have to
make.

It would be much cheaper to do the scanning herself.  By the time that she
gets that many slide scans done, she will savvy about doing at least that
job.
Jim

Suggest you scan those old photos with a scanner,then create them to
photo slideshow by DVD burned. Your mom will view the slideshow  on TV
or DVD player easily.

So you can try Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder for free trial.
http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/dvd-slideshow-builder.html

I think your mom isn't  afraid those memoried photos.

Before I get into your question, the only thing I'd question that was
posted earlier is that a flatbed scanner will do as good a job as a
dedicated film scanner. I haven't gone to the time and expense of
trying both, but the research I did said the opposite: For best results
use a dedicated film scanner. That's not to say my research is right
and the other poster is wrong. Just to alert you to the fact that there
is a difference of opinion.

Turning to self-scans vs. paying someone, I am in a somewhat similar
situation and have scanned about 800 slides and negatives so far on my
own -- and still have a lot to go. There are clear tradeoffs and I'm
still not sure which way I'll go on the rest, or what mixture I'll use.
Here's what I found:

One scanning service I tried did a horrible job. Another did a great
job. So, before committing 5,000 slides to one or another serivce, I'd
like to see the results of a test sample. Ideally you'd also scan the
same slides yourself (maybe borrowing someone's scanner) and compare.
My horrible scans cost $0.80 each and my great ones cost $1.50 each.
That's not to say that price and quality are always correlated, but it
does say that 5,000 slides are likely to cost $5,000. That's a lot
compared to the $600 I spent on my DiMAGE Scan Elite II, but I spend
several minutes on each slide I scan. And if I use PSE (PhotoShop
Elements) on it, allow another few minutes per slide. So, if your time
is worth more than $20 or $30 an hour, it's "cheaper" to have an
outside place do the scans.

Even though I value my time at more than that, I'm still doing scans on
my own. Why? As someone else pointed out, it's an opportunity to relive
each slide's memories.

Plus, I'm getting almost 20 Megapixel scans vs. only 5 Mp from the
"great" outside shop. My scanner will do 80 Mp scans, but 20 Mp is
plenty for all but the top few pictures that I might want to blow up
into posters at some time. And, at 20 Mp, each scan is 60 MB. At 80 Mp
they'd be 240 MB (almost a quarter of a gig!) each. While storage is
getting cheap (a little under $1 per gig external), that still adds a
non-trivial expense (tho getting cheaper over time) plus it loads the
CPU needlessly on most pictures. Even once I've compressed to JPEG for
storage on my internal drive (keeping the TIFFs on the external
drive!), the 80 Mp pictures would take a long time to open and display
on my 1.7 Mp screen. Admittedly, I zoom in on some and there the 20 Mp
is nice to have. But 80 is probably overkill on most.

Another advantage to scanning myself is I sometimes will crop at scan
time instead of afterward. Not a big advantage, but still there.

So why might I have an outside service do some or most of my remaining
scans? At the rate I'm going, I might be dead before I finish my 5,000
scans. An outside service does it quickly. There's still a lot of work
to organize the pictures, and PS takes about as much time as a scan,
but if I am strong, I can resist the temptation to fix EVERY photo, and
save that for the really good ones. Or do them first and come back to
the others if there's time.

Also, the good outside service seems to do some exposure and color
correction that is equivalent to many of the changes I can make with
PSE. That really saves time!

And, if I find a slide they've scanned that I really love, I can always
scan it myself and take lots of time on it.

If you scan yourself, here are a few things I've learned (any
corrections to things I've mislearned are welcome):

I've found that auto-exposure helps on both slides and negatives. The
default setting on my scanner was AE on negatives only. Early on, I
tended to use additional manual exposure compensation (over and above
what AE did) on dark slides, but tended to overdo it and got "blown
out" whites. Better to use less compensation on the scan and use PSE or
similar to fix via Levels, etc. Now I get good shadow detail, without
blown out whites. It took a while to learn what helped in PSE, so allow
some time for learning/experimenting. In my experience, Auto Smartfix
tends to overdo it, but 10-20% Adjust Smartfix (another option) seemed
to work better. Lately, I'm using Levels and Autolevels more. No one
method works best on all pictures, which adds to the time it takes.

If you have a Mac get GraphicConverter ($30 shareware). It will do
batch renames and batch resizing, etc. Before I had GC, I had to rename
each scan (e.g., TRAY15.tif0047 where the 0047 was an index added by
the scanner software). Each time I did that the Mac OS asked me if I
really wanted to change the extension! GC handled it nicely. Similarly,
if you want to create smaller than 20 Mp pictures and/or limit the file
size, GC does that very nicely. I imagine there's similar SW for
Windows, but don't know what it is.

My scanner software has ICE, ROC (restoration of color) and GEM (grain
reduction). I use ICE all the time and it really helps. ROC and GEM
don't seem to work so well and I've used PSE instead to restore color
that wasn't what I wanted and to reduce noise. I also didn't find that
noise reduction via multiple scans helped much if at all, so I've
stopped using it.

Hoping this helps.

Martin

To put things in perspective, a basic scan with a dedicated film scanner
will take at least 3 minutes/slide. It will take MUCH longer if you get
fancy and use Digital ICE and/or some of the other image enhancing
software.
For 5,000 slides you are looking at 15,000 minutes or 250 hours!!!!
Working 2.5 hours/day, every day, 7 days/week you are looking at over 3
months to complete the job. If Mom isn't very computer savvy, multiply
that time by 1.5 or 2.
Bottom Line......It ain't gonna happen.

Let me suggest two approaches.
1. Almost certainly, not all 5,000 slides are "keepers".
So choose the top 10%.....That's still more images than most people
        will voluntarily look at.
2. Let "Discount Digital Art" (Jim Waggener's suggested site) do a
Deluxe scan for 45¢/slide. That is one helluva bargain for a 9MP image
cropped, color corrected and treated with Digital ICE.
For $225 the job will ACTUALLY get done with no muss and no fuss and you
and your mom can get on with your lives..

If mom has a REAL interest in Digital Photography, you might consider
getting a Nikon Coolpix 5600 and a Nikon slide copier adapter for about
$225 total. Then let her copy her choices of slides. That method takes
about 0.5 minutes per slide and you end up with a 5 MP image.......WAY,
WAY more resolution than you need for viewing on a TV or Computer.
That's plenty good enough for making 8x10 enlargements  of the creme de
la creme images
Bob Williams

Greetings,

Sounds like your Mom has quite a project planned. A quick review of some
service sites shows that the cost would be somewhere in the 4000 - 50000
range. Quite a bit of money. You can get some nice equipment for that
kind of cash.

Although your Mom is not proficient at scanning and computers, etc., I
suspect she would be upon completing this project. She would likely gain
a great deal of knowledge in terms of computing, use of the internet,
imaging, and creative applications in the doing, not to mention some
nice equipment. If she has any interest at all, that may be the way to
go. If she is a busy woman, then maybe not. Most people would enjoy the
task and take pride in it.

I would consult with your Mom on the prospects of the task, and of
course, if she has the 4-5 thousand dollars if she wants someone else to
do it.

Talk to you soon,

Ron Baird

My

******************************************************************
If mom doesn't want to do it herself, I would suggest another option is to
get a kid that knows his/her way around computers and will come over and
scan them for her.  She could provide a snack and give the kid a few bucks
an hour.  Some 14 year old that does baby sitting for a few bucks per hour
would jump at a chance to read a book while the computer is scanning, and
not have to deal with a crying baby.  It sounds like a nice summer job.  Ric
in Wisconsin.

I'd get a scanner and either do it yourself or pay someone to do it.
http://digitalartphotographyfordummies.blogspot.com/

Per Mirsky:

I went through the same thing for myself and a couple thousand slides.

Tried taking a box or two of slides to the local photo store and having them do
it.     They gave me back a set of CDs, but the formatting wasn't what I wanted.
Especially the file names....

I'd think their quality was probably better than mine just because they're
probably using a very expensive scanner - but I didn't care for it.

Also, there was the anxiety of some minimum wage worker handling my slides and
maybe losing/damaging them.

In the end I bought a Nikon CoolScan 4000 and did it myself.

Some benefits:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1) As you handle the slides, memories come back.

2) You can assign file names right then and there.
  e.g. 1981 04-04 Ange Steff John Adrian Steve Easter Film44 0023

  I name my slides starting with year month-day so that if I do a search
  the results can come back sorted in chronological order.

  I suffix them with the source.  i.e. if I wanted to re-scan that
  slide or negative, where would I go to physically find it.

3) You can touch up the scans as needed.   For me this was mainly
  lightening too-dark shots, the occasional crop, and some red eye
  removal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some additional costs (over and above the cost of the scanner)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Some kind of editing program.   It should support lightening,
 darkening, cropping, saving in different formats/resolutions,
 and red eye removal.   I splurged on PhotoShop because I wanted
 whatever skills I acquired to be transferable to more outside
 situations.  PhotoShop seemed tb the lingua franca at the time.

- Plenty of hand holding.  It may take some significant time just
 to get the person doing the scanning to understand something as
 obvious (to you and me....) as directories/subdirectories - not
 to mention JPEG quality....

- A storage/retrieval program.   Once you have 5,000 scans you need
 to be able to look at them, print selected images, sort them,
 search them and so-on and so-forth.    Once again, I splurged
 and chose ThumbsPlus.  Does it all.   *Might* even perform all
 of the abovementioned editing functions - i.e. maybe I could
 have saved the money spent on PhotoShop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I scanned everything at max scanner rez and saved as max quality JPEG.

I think that scanning at anything less is penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Even though you can get a decent 4x6 from lower resolution scans, there's
still the issues of cropping, larger prints, and zooming.

Purists will save as .TIFF - but the difference in disk space used and
load times when browsing is so huge that I decided to forgo that.  
If I want to do more extensive editing, I can always re-scan the image
as .TIFF.

How old is your mother? 5000 slides done right might not leave her a
lot of years to enjoy the scans.