[davidmanze]

 For keeping my memories of our hippy house sharing days on a site, my friend and I used his scanner to digitalize our slides, it went well enough with however a lot of de-spotting. It was quite a decent scanner (I can't remember the make/model), but a slide scanner with good resolution  is expensive, a decent one can easily be a grand.

  Is it not viable to have the slides scanned by a lab? This would elevate the need to buy any gear, eliminate the grief and give you instant images to review and de-spot t your leisure, you could find a quote from a lab for a bulk scan.