New basic film scanner or second-hand 'better' one?

Hi,

I am looking to scan a load of my old slides.
I was wondering whether it would be better to buy a cheap, new film
scanner or buy an older second hand scanner on ebay.

The question is - does the advance in technology form say a coolscan
III's era now mean that a budget new scanner produces as good/better
results or can those older scanners still hold their own?

I dont have a huge budget - around the £100-£150 mark.

Thanks
squelch41

On Sep 28, 5:54 am, squelc....TakeThisOut@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am looking to scan a load of my old slides.
> I was wondering whether it would be better to buy a cheap, new film
> scanner or buy an older second hand scanner on ebay.
>
> The question is - does the advance in technology form say a coolscan
> III's era now mean that a budget new scanner produces as good/better
> results or can those older scanners still hold their own?
>
> I dont have a huge budget - around the £100-£150 mark.

I guess you are in the UK since you give your budget in pounds. When
I was looking for a dedicated slide scanner I found that the current
Nikon models on ebay were going for not much less than the new price,
but of course without the warrantee and so on so I got a new one.
However, it was way out of your price bracket and I suspect that would
still be the case even for the older models - you have to look to
see, I bit the financial bullet and got a batch feeder on Ebay for
half the new price, as I had enough slides that hand-feeding them or
doing them 4 at a time would be very tedious. I also brought what was
then a *big* USB external HDD to store the scans on!

Some new flatbed scanners that I think are in your price range have
Digital ICE, which unless you are scanning Kodachrome does a terrific
job of getting rid of marks from dirt and scratches. However it
usually doesn't produce acceptable results with Kodachrome, so if you
have Kodachrome slides it won't help which is a pity since the older
card mounts seem to be constantly shedding bits of dust onto the
slides.... Mine are a mixture of Kodachrome and Fujichrome, plus I am
still taking Fujichrome from time to time.

Also, the Nikons require slides to be fed one by one unless you have a
model that accepts a batch feeder *and* you can get a feeder (which
don't come up often and blow the budget), so you might find a modern
flat-bed that allows you to scan more at once better for your
purposes.