A few weeks ago, we here at the Journal received what can best be calles an early Christmas present; a Hewlett Packard ScanJet 6100C. This thing has to be one of the coolest toys I've gotten to play with during the time I've spent at the Journal. In the words of Matt Richards, our productions editor, "It's Dope." Rob thinks that watching the little bright light go back and forth is better than sex.

The 6100C also comes with an adaptor which lets it scan slides as well. While it scans prints with unsurpasses quality and clarity, I was curious how it does when it comes to slides. Unfortunately it has several drawbacks. Fist of all, the adaptor is triangle shaped with mirrors along the sloping sides. Becuase of this, scanning must be done with the top up. I found that even though the slide is covered by the adaptor scans come out too dark for my tastes. This can be fixed through Photoshop, but I found that I can never really get the image to look how I thought it should. Also, the size of the slides is a problem. If you just want to scan thumbnail size images, you should have no problem. However, to get images large enough to work with, the scaling must be jacked way up. When scanning the images below, I had the scaling up to 600%.

The 6100C is obviuosly made for print scanning and the slide adaptor seems like it was thrown in as an afterthought. If you plan to scan a large amount of images from slides, I would recommend buying a scanner that is made specifically for slides or negatives. The images below were all scanned from color slides and were taken in my mom's garden one beautiful summer evening long ago.