In article et,
says...
On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:01:30 +0000, Adrian wrote:

- When you choose a projector, find our what the replacement bulbs
cost. They are not your standard car headlamp bulb - and some of the
prices may make your eyes water, careful choice of projector could
save you lots of money when it comes to replacing the bulb. (You'll
want to carry a spare bulb with you)

Aye, and fanatically follow the power up/down sequence particulary the
power down letting the thing cool properly before moving it. Oh and the
"replace bulb" message after x hours can probably be ignored until the
bulb actually fails or you notice a degraded image. Like printer
cartridges, the makers make their money on the bulbs with "fixed" life...

Pay attention to the specs as well, particulary the image brightness.
Comparing will probably be a PITA as I doubt there is a standard distance
used. So to make sensible comparisions you'll have to take the distance
into account with the inverse square rule. I'm not sure a spec saying x
lumens with a given image size is a reliable method, if the image size
varies you'd still have to correct it and you'd need to know the distance
for that image size.

- A stand-alone unit will mean you don't have to lug a PC round with
you - but if I was you, I'd make sure that I had 2 copies of the card
/ disk / whatever with your slides on... - call me paranoid !

For PC read laptop and PowerPoint (or non-windows equivalent) you can add
captions and/or explanatory/title slides in PP very easily. Does a
stand-alone unit take a PP presentation or just image files?

You might find a commercial service that will take a box of slides and
scan them for you - depends how much your time is worth to you vs what
they want to charge you.

Go for the very best scanning you can afford. Preferably with the basic
scanned immage in a "raw" format rather than anything compressed.
Compression throws away information, you orginal scanned image needs to be
the highest quality you can achieve. You then make your slides from that
to what ever the current systems require.

A decent commercial service I'd expect to produce a high resolution raw
image then a selection of different resolution compressed ones per slide.
Don't forget to take a backup copy or three of your scanned images, CD/DVD
media *does* degrade over time. Maybe take another copy every year. Media
is cheap, data is priceless.

What is "high resolution" these days I'm not sure but I'd expect something
over 2400 x 1800 and that's only 4M pixel, quality digital cameras these
days are 10M pixel or above (4800 x 3600 ish) and a colour depth of at
least 24 bits/pixel. For display 800 x 600 or 1024x768 jpeg format will be
Many thanks for all the detailed info, and especially your comments re
quality of scanning.
--
Charlie Pridham, Gardening in Cornwall
www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of national collections of Clematis viticella cultivars and
Lapageria rosea