From my analogue days I still own some thousand slides. A
few of them are so interesting and well done, that I view them for myself
every once in a while. What would be better than have these
digitized. The first experiments with our Epson scanner,
which has an optional transparency adapter for just this purpose were
awful. Theynot only run very tedious and lengthy (it
takes several minutesfor just one
slide) but the result was also rather modest. A
good slide
scanner , which operates more or less automatically cost a few hundred
Dollars. It had to be a cheaper, quicker and result in excellent images.
This is how it works:
1) For your digital camera you need a macro lens with a reproduction scale
of 1:1 (35 mm equivalent). My
Zuiko 35 f3.5 allows even 2:1.
2) My slide and negative holder I have glued together from old foto stuff.
An old rubber lens hood supplied the 52mm filter ring for connection to the
lens, the rubber was cut off and I glued the ring on an old Nikon body
plastic cap. An old
slide viewer ("Gucki") was robbed
of his lens and glued to the center of it (before, of course, I cut a
corresponding hole in the adapter):
3) Screw this slide copier onto the macro lens and align it
horizotally. It is recommended to put the camera on a
tripod and place it in front of a large white wall. Now you can use
the built-in camera flash to enlighten the scene with day-light (it's
easier in terms of white ballance).
4) As you can imagine, such a "slide scan" is done in a fraction of a
second. However, one must still put slide for slide into the holder.
Nevertheless, it is very fast. A magazine with 50 slides is photographed in
about 3 minutes.
5) Digital editing is of course necessary. 35 mm slides come in 3:2 format,
my FourThirds camera takes 4:3 images. Thus, it remains a black bar at each
the top and bottom and a small black border on the left and right. You can
crop this frame by frame with any image editing software and also do white
balance, contrast, brightness, adjust gamma curve, sharpness, etc.. But it
turns out quickly that the settings almost always are the same for most
photos of one series. Why not automate this. The freeware IrfanView has a batch mode to convert raw
data into useful digital images in one go. Including looking through, save,
delete etc I've done about 100 slides per hour at the very reasonable
quality, such as the following picture taken from a black and white slide
(1988):
For anybody sparing the effort of the DIY, you can also buy such slide copier e.g. here. Some of them come with an internal lens (no need for the macro lens) and can be used even with more simple digital cameras. I made only good experiences with the method. It's fast and delivers excellent results. I can only shake my head reading a customer review on Amazon. The guy wants to scan 10 000 slides with a 1000 € slide scanner that takes five minutes for each slide and is happy with that...
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