Slide to digital

Any recommendations for a good quality, reasonably priced slide to digital converter?  I'd prefer one with a good viewing screen, is reasonably fast, and has internal storage and review capacity. Oh yeah, one that even someone with very limited 'tech skills' can operate. Is this asking for too much?

I have a high quality image scanner with slide trays.  My recommendation is to send them to a service.  It is a huge PITA.

Thanks for the advice Jay. Would you mind elaborating a bit on why it is such a PITA? I have a huge number of slides, a fair percentage of which I'd like to digitize, so sending to a service also seems like it would be very time-consuming--even just the ' packaging' and shipping aspect. With my own scanner I think it would give me better control over the process, but maybe I'm missing something...

I’ll second Jay’s advice. I sent hundreds of old slides off to ScanCafe, and after just a few weeks got a flash drive plus a CD and the originals back. The quality of images was good enough to then use for print purposes. Time savings alone was worth every penny… which as I recall, wasn’t very much. 

I have a Plustek OpticFilm scanner.  It's decent quality, but it takes quite a while to scan and convert slides.  

I agree that generally, it's better to just send slides to a service.  I reserve doing my own scanning for troublesome slides with strange lighting or other issues where I really want to control the scanning process.  

Seems like a bit of a developing consensus here for sending instead of self-scanning--from folks with a great deal of experience. Still, is it primarily the time involved--being retired, time is less of an issue for me, or are there other significant negatives that you have with 'self-service'?

If I do go the 'out-sourcing' route, I have another question. How do you package your slides for shipping? Many of my slides are currently sitting individually in carousels, so I'm not clear how I can safely package them for shipping. Also, once everything is scanned, are the slides returned to you you in addition to a thumb drive and/or CD?
Thanks for your responses.

As I alluded to a little, the service I used sent back the originals in the carousels and the flash drive with CD. I had boxes for the carousels that they came in, Kodak-era. Just filled out the form and followed the instructions and that was that.

One thing you could consider is getting a $10 slide viewer (if you don’t have something to view them on already). I was able to cull down some slides and not digitize any blurry, out of focus, etc that weren’t necessary. As I recall, they charged by the slide.

The reason I chose the service was also that the slide scanners for sale were way more expensive than the service itself 

Alan Rubin wrote:

Thanks for the advice Jay. Would you mind elaborating a bit on why it is such a PITA? I have a huge number of slides, a fair percentage of which I'd like to digitize, so sending to a service also seems like it would be very time-consuming--even just the ' packaging' and shipping aspect. With my own scanner I think it would give me better control over the process, but maybe I'm missing something...

Work flow is pretty brutal.  Load 12 slides in correct orientation (maybe), pre-scan, scan (takes minutes), review to find any loaded incorrectly (fix), edit to fix orientation if necessary, move from landing directory to photo software, unload 12 slides.  Takes forever and therefore I never finished and still have slides all over the place.  I did the highest-value family photos.