Once you have it set up it's pretty fast. My usual method is with a light table and a macro lens.

If I still had my wood shop set up I might consider making a simplified model for sale, but I suspect there's not a lot of demand. Some come with internal lenses so a macro lens isn't necessary, but I don't use them - I just use the mechanical parts, since I found using the optics with other lenses produced images I considered unusable. If you only have 35mm slides, then one of the slide copier attachments should work fine with a macro lens. My medium format ones are in glass mounts. Many of mine are in plastic mounts which hold them loosely. Most macro lenses have a very flat field so you can't compensate with field curvature. Focus at copying distance is pretty important, and I usually shoot at f/8 or so to allow for slide warping and focus a bit out from the center on each slide - they're usually cupped significantly unless they're in glass mounts, and they're not necessarily uniform from one to the next. It's good to review each one at 1:1 to make sure you nailed focus. The postprocessing takes at least as long per slide, but of course you only have to do that when you need them. 100 an hour is realistic, and as long as your slides are fun to review it's not too boring. It probably takes about 15 minutes to set up the system for use, then about 15-30 seconds per slide to shoot. If they've been in a slide projector in the past, or stored loose, they'll be dusty. You do have to be careful to clean the slides first if they have any significant amount of dust - removing much dust with Photoshop is a real pain. This didn't work for me since I have so many medium format slides to copy.

You'll get horrific distortion and vignetting with nearly all other lenses, particularly zooms. Instead of building a frame for consistency, you can get an inexpensive slide copier attachment that goes in front of a lens from photo dealers, but watch your light source, and don't expect good results unless you use it with a macro lens. With dust removal at high resolution, these take an inordinate amount of time per slide. I find it much quicker than trying to use a flatbed or film scanner. I use a 60mm f/2.8 D Nikkor macro lens to copy at high resolution to my D810.

I could have scanned and postprocessed 50 or 100 slides on a scanner in the few hours time it took to build the setup. Watch the histogram to get a good exposure - it should be pretty consistent from slide to slide once you have the setup. The rail and frame keeps all the images well aligned and at the same copy ratio, and prevents reflections on the front of the slides (I put a box over the setup between camera and slide frame when shooting). I made a copy rail and frame from Baltic birch plywood that I use to copy 35mm and medium-format slides using a small light panel as a light source - see my gallery for images of the copy setup. I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with any of these or if there are any others which anyone would recommend.

Using this would be an extremely tedious and time consuming method - and I haven't been able to evaluate the quality yet. I currently have an Epson V600 flat bed scanner which comes with an adapter for slides and negatives. As I've got thousands to do, I need a method which isn't extremely time consuming and isn't very tedious. I'm looking for a good method to scan thousands of slides and negatives which I have.

Printer does not scan slides