The standard scanners that you buy in the computer stores aren't up producing quality images from slides. I've tired them and they're piss-poor at best. That device in the link actually is a pretty good value, though I would check around to see what else is out there. In particular, DAK comes up with some nifty stuff, now that he's back in business.

Consider how much it costs to take a single slide and have a print made from it, or to have it scanned. I did the reverse recently--my boss needed some slides made from prints. For five photos it cost $36 for the slides to be made. That was an easy one--photograph the print, make the slide. But when you're doing the scanning of slides one at a time and converting them, it's labor intensive and you can easily run yourself up a $500 to $600 charge (enough to buy the machine) if you convert many slides. And I have tons of them. I'll keep track of this thread, because that kind of slide scanner is precisely the sort of thing I'll need if I plan to use some of my older slides for articles (they're of historic places that have changed a lot over the years, so my photos are quite a resource at this point).

I disagree about using all of the free programs also. Some of them are pretty good for the simple stuff, changing the size of an image (for the web it's a good idea to reduce a 5 meg tiff down to a 50K jpg so it will load quickly). If you're going to start using digital images that are important you need to keep a large stable version that you can work from, and some of those free programs are stumped by the huge amount of information that a photographic tiff file can produce. If you're looking at something to download like PaintShop Pro it's a halfway decent program for around $100 (I haven't priced it lately, but that's what it was going for a few years ago). Macromedia has a photo program in their Dreamweaver suite, Microsoft discontinued theirs (PhotoDraw), and then there's PhotoShop. That's the industry standard, and it's expensive and the learning curve is substantial, but if you're taking your photos seriously, that's the way to go.

If this is hobby photos and it isn't a big deal, the free programs will work. But you might look around and see if there is a way to borrow or rent a good scanner to get the photos into a digital format and consider spending a little something for a photo program. PhotoShop Elements, perhaps.

SRS