The days of dragging a projector into the front room to subject family and friends to a slideshow of our holiday snaps are long dead, and many of us may be thankful that is the case. But those of us who still have shoeboxes full of 35mm film slides and want to travel back in time to revisit cherished memories, or are re-discovering a love of shooting on film, want a more practical and portable alternative means of bringing those images to life.
Enter the battery-operated handheld slide viewer; with viewing alternatives also including mains-powered light-boxes, handheld loupes that utilize ambient light, and if we want to digitize said slides, then of course the film scanner too. Nowadays, of course, some very basic level ‘scanning’ can be achieved with simply a lightbox and a smartphone.