Glass Slide Scanning

One of our specialties is scanning glass encased slides.

Many of our customers have slides that are encased in a double layer of glass such as the examples below. These are medium format slides and you can see the size as compared to a regular 35mm slide leaning up against the pile. These slides also have the metal edging for added protection. Our charge for scanning medium format film, including the glass slides, up to 120 or 620 film is $2.00 per 6(cm) x 6(cm) or 2.25" x 2.25" frame.

The slides, below  are the glass encased slides also but they do not have the metal edging on them. These are also medium format slides.

Below, you can see what the glass slide looks like when viewed from the edge. The slide is the white area and it is sandwiched in-between the two pieces of glass. The purpose of the glass is to protect the slide from dirt, mold or mildew or scratches.

Unfortunately, the glass does not stop the glass encased slides from fading just like any other slide film. See the example to the below. This slide was once a colorful street scene but now, because the cyan dye has faded drastically, the beautiful color is gone. Sometimes we can do quite a bit to restore at least some of the color that has been lost because of the dyes fading away. Color restoration is included in our low pricing.

Faded Glass Enclosed Slide

Our Color Restoration

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The question often comes up, from our customers:
"How do I package my glass slides so that you will get them and they won't be broken?"

We generally leave it up to our customer to decide the best way to package and ship but we can show you what one of our customers has done with his packaging job and we think that his method works very well.

First of all, what would cause a stack of glass slides to break during shipment? The main thing that will give you a problem, if you already are going to be using a lot of packing peanuts and bubble wrap and that is space in-between the slides.

Think of the Karate Chop trick where a person will chop through a whole stack of bricks or pieces of wood. Naturally it takes a certain amount of strength and technique but the real trick to breaking a stack of bricks is to separate the bricks so that there is space in-between the bricks. Notice that there are dowels or spacers keeping the bricks apart. When the Karate Master strikes the first brick and continues the downward force, the fact that the top brick can be pushed down onto the brick below it and then that one onto the one below it and so on, accomplishes the "trick."

The lesson we can learn from this trick is to not let there be any space between the separate glass slides.

Our customer put rubber bands around his slides, then braced the stack with pieces of cardboard. We don't think that using the rubber bands was necessarily a good idea because it puts space in-between the slides just as the dowels did in the example above but, otherwise, this is an excellent packaging idea.

After they got a nice firms stack of slides, they wrapped the whole thing up with foam packing material forming a type of "slide cocoon" with a virtually solid stack of glass slide inside.  This is an extremely secure way to package the glass slides.

Then put the slide "cocoon" into a large box with a lot of packing peanuts and you will have a very secure way to ship your glass slides without fear of them getting broken. Remember to pull the wrapping material very tight so there can be no movement of the slides.

We don't think the Karate Master will be breaking any bricks that are not separated from each other and we don't think that your slides are going to break if you package them as pictured above.

35mm Glass Encased Slides

You can see an example of a  glass enclosed 35mm slide in a metal casing to the left. This glass encased slide currently costs $1 per slide for our specialty scanning. They are scanned at 4,000 ppi.

Glass Enclosed 35mm Film

 

 

 

 

 

 

The same  35mm glass slide disassembled.

More examples of Glass Slides