I, too, used to use Ektachrome and Kodachrome a lot on the theory that (A) it was cheaper than print media and (B) I could always get color prints made from them by sending them out, just like Ben, and for some of them I did just that.
But when I tried to scan them on my HP scanner years ago, I, too, discovered that I needed light from above, not below. Knowing that HP had a complete language ("PCL" for "Printer Control Language") for some really, really detailed control of their printers, and having used it for some special work projects, I asked them what language they had for their scanners. My intent was to turn off their internal lamp by software while the scanning bar went by the subject slide, lit from above. (I still have the HP-PCL language manual around somewhere that I bought with my own money.)
The brusque "get-to-the-next-call" answer from one of Rajesh Koothrapoli's distant relatives was that it was impossible, and that they did not have an equivalent "Scanner Control Language." I found that hard to believe and followed up with a direct snail-mail inquiry to HP and never got an answer.
I also thought it might be a good way to take color negatives, scan them, reverse the colors in MS-Paint, and print them out on my color printer.
I was tempted to open the thing up and disconnect the lamp and try it again with an overhead lamp, but kind of lost interest in the project for a while... like 15 years by now.
Interesting about the Epson printer noted above being able to do it.
I've got a small suitcase full of slides from the mid-sixties to early seventies, when I went back to color print film. Some of those I would love to print, like the one of the toolroom model of JMB's first 1911 which I took at the Browning Museum in Utah. And of his original "potato digger" machine gun in the same museum.
Terry, 230RN
