You can now locally obtain high quality scanning of old photo negatives and slides to create digital copies.
Over the past couple of years I found myself thinking more and more about images taken before the switch to a digital camera. All those great pictures were sitting in boxes in the closet, and so scanning became a priority.
I was reluctant to send my negatives across the continent, so I embarked on trials of different film scanners, making the decision to invest in the Nikon CoolScan 9000ED. This scanner does a wonderful job of eliminating dust and small imperfections in the negatives, plus it scans the image several times with different light intensities to be able to get as much detail out of the bright and dark areas of the negatives.
Rates start at $0.50 for slides or negatives.