Verified answer

Teri, I happily honor you with one of my stock answers, but maybe you should re-post this question in Photography for more answers, as it seems not to be drawing that well. Or ask in the group.

If you don't want to lose the resolution and details, you are going to have to bite the bullet and get a good film scanner. The Nikon Coolscan V ED will go up to 4,000 dpi resolution. There is a slight learning curve, but it's a great piece of equipment. Minolta makes one that is probably comparable in the same price range, which is about $550. There is another company that I am not familiar with called Pacific Image that makes several slighly lower resolution film scanners for about half the price.

There are other Nikon products as well as some by other manufacturers. I chose the Coolscan V ED because a review in Popular Photography said that the dynamic range of the V ED was greater than perceived by the human eye and that's good enough for my purposes.

Here's one example of a slide I scanned. Flickr will allow up to a 20x30 poster print from this high resolution image.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/53836847...

Here's a link to more scanned slides: http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/tags/sli...

Here's a link to a lower priced scanner that would also be suitable:

http://www.popphoto.com/digitalscanners/2491/which...