The cover on the V500 and some other Perfection scanners from Epson have the ability to capture a back-lighted image from the slide and store it on your PC. If you have an edit program (like Adobe Photoshop Elements) you can also improve the images after capturing them from your slides. I haven't had the need to scan my own slides but have at least verified that the Epson hardware has the capability to scan the slides and make a copy that can be stored on your disk.

The cost of doing the capture is essentially zero after you get through the learning process. Good luck!