Slides, Negatives & Photo Conversion

Just as videography has gone through a transformation from film to digital the world of photography is currently experiencing the most dramatic conversion ever. Most people today use digital photography for the easy use, convenient storage and media portability. It wasn't always this way.


The 3 most common film formats that we convert to digital are - 35mm and 120mm Slides, 35mm and 120mm Negatives and printed photographs of any size. We use only the highest quality Canon scanners and usually scan to 300 dpi (suitable to reprint an 8x10 image). Of course we can scan at higher resolutions upon request.

Here are a few advantages to converting your Slide Film, Negatives and Photographs to a digital format like Jpeg, Tiff or PSD . . .

• Desktop computers, laptops and iPods have tons of storage capability. Some of the newer iPods can hold as much as 5,000 photos, so by going digital you save space.

• Your photos are organized and accessible.

• By using a number of FREE online photo players you can store, change and share your images. Download A free software download from Google. Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

35mm Slides.

35mm film gauge most commonly used for both still photography and motion pictures, and remains relatively unchanged since its introduction in 1892 by William Dickson and Thomas Edison, using film stock supplied by George Eastman. The photographic film is cut into strips 1 3/8 inches or 35 mm wide — hence the name. The standard negative pulldown is four perforations per frame along both edges, which makes for exactly 16 frames per foot.

Slides are still generally preferred by professionals and many amateurs when working with traditional film. Slides are often sharper and have better colour reproduction. Generally, slides have a longer life span than color prints.

Direct positive slide film is less forgiving of exposure errors than the negative - print - and development process chain. With negatives, the overall value may be sensed after processing and the exposure of the positive image controlled to compensate. The simplest point and shoot and disposable cameras do not even control exposure, a demonstration of the wide exposure latitude of the processes. It is also more cumbersome to display if only a few images are to be shown, although small battery powered direct viewers are available and suitable for use by one or two viewers.

A slide is a special type of transparency intended to be projected onto a screen using a slide projector. This allows the photograph to be viewed by a room-full of people at the same time. Slides were at one time an important medium for presentations, but LCD projectors, though inferior in resolution and color reproduction, have largely replaced traditional slide projectors for this purpose.

The most common form of modern slide is the 35mm slide, essentially a positive-image printing onto the standard 35mm film used in the movie industry, then placed inside a cardboard or plastic shell. Older projectors used a sliding mechanism to manually pull the transparency out of the side of the machine, where it could be replaced by the next image, and it is from this that we get the name "slide". Modern projectors typically use a carousel that holds a large number of slides, and viewed by a mechanism that automatically pulls a single slide out of the carousel and places it in front of the lamp.

Slide frames, 1940 (metal) to 1985 (plastic)	Slide archive box

120mm Slides

Same as 35mm but obviously larger in size. Used mainly by professional photographers. Click on the photo to see an enlargement.