Re: Slide Scanner....

Quality of the result had been the unspoken component until now.

My experience has been different from yours apparently. Typically I do not remove slides from their mountings because I keep them afterwards, and I find that they keep better, more neatly, if they are still in mountings. Very early in my photography "career" I learned to leave enough extra around the picture I wanted to provide room for the frame (and besides, a typical viewfinder does that for you anyway), so if anything my final cropped scan ends up covering less than the area visible on the original slide because it is a better picture that way.

I actually have two dedicated slide scanners. I haven't mentioned my Nikon LS-2000 in this thread, partly because Nikon no longer makes scanners (I bought mine refurbished) and partly because it requires an XP or older computer (which I keep around solely for this purpose); the one weakness of the Plustek is that it doesn't handle overly dark slides / negatives well, so I need the Nikon scanner for them at minimum. Both the Nikon and the Plustek scanner have software which allows me to do some adjustments during the scan phase, but I still use an old version of Photoshop and/or GIMP to finish the process. After I scan the picture, I do edit it in software such as Photoshop or GIMP to clean up any issues, and if anything is not right, such as being out of focus, I rescan it; I have typically found that (with the scanners I use) if the center is in focus, the entire slide has been in focus. Incidentally, the Nikon scanner actually does adjust focus of the entire slide before it starts a scan, and it refuses to perform the scan if it cannot put the entire slide into focus.

Yes, this does take time, and I end up doing only a few each day, but since I am "only" 66, I feel I can do that, and although I am not quite the perfectionist Jerry Day is, I would rather leave behind an incomplete collection of good scans than a complete collection of mediocre ones.