Hi Folks,  Here is some experience relating to scanning slides.
I bought a small, manual slide scanner after reading a bunch of
reviews.  I ordered it about 11 A.M. on Tuesday and it arrived in
the mail on Thursday -- not bad for traveling from California to
New York.

With a discount of $20 bucks off and free shipping the bill was $150,
including about 10 bucks tax.  No software required; setup amounts
to plugging it in to your USB port or a 5-volt wall-wart.  You insert
a slide, check it on the 2.4" screen, push two buttons, wait three
seconds, and you're done.

It's a Wolverine "F2D Mighty" 20 Meg scanner.  In addition to 35 mm
slides, it does six other positive and negative [transparency] formats
down to 8 mm.  One scan takes about 3 seconds.  Actually, the scan is
almost instantaneous and the "save" takes 3 seconds.  I kept rough
track of the time and it took about 20 minutes to do 100 slides, or
12 seconds per slide.  That includes taking them out of and putting
them back into the slide tray.

You can save the images on the internal memory (sort of small --
stores 40 images) or you can insert an SD memory card of up to 32GB.
I had a 2GB SD card from an old camera and it will hold about 1500
images.  You can put the SD card into a reader on your computer or
you can download the images through the scanner into the USB port.

If you have questions, they have a great web site, including a how-to
video.  Or you can write me if you want.

Regards,
Craig Smith