How to speed up scanning 35mm or 2 1/4'' slides on drum or large format scanners

Applies to high-end drum scanners (e.g. Howtek drum scanner) and large format flatbed scanners

Scanning small objects such as 35mm or 2 and 1/4'' films on a drum scanner such as the Howtek D4000/4500 or larger or with a large format flatbed scanner is quite time consuming. Because every slide is too small in the preview, you must zoom into each one, and you can therefore not properly evaluate and correct nor optimize each image.

In order to increase the efficiency of your workflow SilverFast has a HIRes preview you can activate. This way the scanner does not have to do a time-consuming zoom; the zoom is instead done by SilverFast because the HIRes preview supplies enough resolution to use a software zoom without running into pixelation of the image.

The proposed workflow: