I’ve continued scanning my slides over the summer but ran into problems with the Epson V700 slide carrier after I’d scanned 3-4000.

The carrier has little spring tabs which hold the mounted transparencies in place. Unfortunately they proved to be rather fragile, especially with slide mounts from the 1960s and 1970s which were a lot thicker than the slide mounts in later years. Slowly the tabs started to break and I finally had one or both sides of four of the twelve slide carrier holes damaged. They could still be used for old, heavy, rigid plastic slide mounts, but the thin paper and plastic mounts tended to be lifted on one side and the slides could move.

After much searching, I eventually found a supplier for replacement carrier who sold them at a reasonable price and could deliver to France (one well-known scanner supplier wanted 20€ for the carrier and the same again for delivery from Germany). As I still had an estimated 5000 or more slides to scan, I bought two carriers for 6€ each (and 15€ delivery; again from Germany) as I knew it was always possible I’d damage another carrier before I’d finished all my scanning.