[CliffordK (OP)]

I just had some inspiration for the upcoming holidays.

I'm thinking of trying to steal some of my Parent's old color slides from the 60's and 70's, and scanning them in to a computer, and returning them to my Mother, my Brother, and perhaps some friends and relatives on CD or DVD.

For E-Mail, I generally like to target photos less than say 1024x1024, or max of about 1MP, perhaps even a bit less.  And editing photos just to shrink them is always a pain.

However, I realize that printing, or zooming, the more pixels the better.  I assume the old film is reasonable quality, but it is still quite old. 

If I do this, I'll probably only want to do it once.  And, I'll probably only do less than 1000 photos, unless I start also doing negatives & prints, but still the demand is a finite demand.

So, what resolution should I look for?

1MP?  4-5 MP?  10MP?  20MP?

[evan_au]

I have a slide scanner with 5 Megapixels resolution. That is enough to reveal tiny specs of dust, lint, or scratches on the slide.
Make sure you clean the slide carefully before scanning it.

[RD]

There are (were) attachment's for SLR film-cameras to copy 35mm slides and negatives ...

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It may be possible to attach such a thing to a modern digital SLR camera via an adapter,
which could work out to be a cheaper option than buying a dedicated digital slide copier.

... editing photos just to shrink them is always a pain.

IrfanView will re-size your 1000 photos in one go, via batch processing ... http://lifehacker.com/345755/batch-resize-images-with-irfanview

... on CD or DVD.

Digital archiving on DVD is a good idea, but for sharing websites like Picasa Flickr seem a more convenient option.