I'm starting to go through my old slides using a HP flatbed scanner (2 at a time). Dust is an issue - not only on the slide but on the scanner glass. That (besides convenience and quality and speed) is probably why the pros use film scanners - fewer surfaces to clean without the scanner glass. The HP at least does 2400 dpi. I tried 4800 from the scan menu and got a memory allocation crash. I use XP with 1GB of RAM.

The clone brush (rubber stamp in Canvas X - my budget doesn't allow Adobe stuff and Canvas gives me for practical purposes the whole suite for less than $500) is very helpful, especially cleaning up the sky, snow, and similar light-colored surfaces.

Drew's time 1/2 hour or so per slide is right on. That's about what it's taking me to extract individual images from the raw scan, crop out the frame, and do a little cleanup - nothing major.

I see a lot of you hosting at railpictures.net. What do they charge for an account allowing posting? Is there a limit on image size that can be linked to and shown here?

Happy Thanksgiving! And thanks for all the great photos.