http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=63077159Mrs. Dual and I (95% effort is on Mrs. Dual's part...
) have been in a
massive project all summer to scan ALL family photos, so far it's at about 20,000 images, give or take.
We've been using the Epson V300 linked above. It's got a lighted backplane under the scanner lid, and an adaptor tray that will scan four 35mm slides, or a strip of 35mm negative. The software is a bit cumbersome, and not as good at cropping multiple photos laid on the glass and scanned at once as our HP all-in-one printer scanner, but the almost-new HP was beginning to grind and squeak after just a few thousand scans.
We've done a lot of research, and anything that will let you just stuff a stack of slides in and will auto-feed and auto-scan them will cost you four figures easily.
Slides seem like a PITA, but the color and quality of them is just amazing, whereas prints from the late 70s and early 80's were already badly faded.
Also, many of the purpose made slide converters are just a CCD camera box and not a "scanner" per-se, and they convert the slides at a few megapixels, but you want something that can scan that slide at 2400 dpi or so. That's pulling about 5-6 megapixels out of a 35mm slide, but it looks better than the converters.
