Peripherals: Whch units are best for printing directly from 35mm slides?

Choose either time or money

I'm not aware of any unit that allows you to print directly from a slide to a print (though I won't say they don't exist). I doubt that there is much market for something like that except at a commercial level, which is major moolah.

There are dedicated slide scanners that make the process as painless as possible, but again, these are pretty pricey. There are also services available that will give you digital photos from slides. Again, quite expensive if you are going to do very many.

Many photo services will also take your slides and make prints, or at least they used to. Again this will not be cheap if you are doing a lot.

For $100 or so you can get a flatbed scanner with slide scanning capabilities. At this price, however, don't count on a quick Monday night session to finish up your scanning. I've been using an Epson Perfection 3490 scanner for about 3 years and it does a good job, but is a very slow process. You can scan 3 or 4 slides at a time and each scan takes maybe 5 minutes from start to finish, plus there is time getting the settings right. If you look at it as a long term project, it's a very economical solution for scanning a lot of slides. I've done a few hundred.