Copying slides

pete4130

I've got a tons of slides that I've shot over the years, some I really like and would maybe like to get them printed or work on them. In the past I've gotten them scanned in labs/shops and printed, never with the greatest of results. It's always hit and miss. I do have my own flatbed neg scanner (Canon 9900F I think) that I got 4 years ago. It doesn't really do as good a job as I'd hoped it would do, with darker scans coming out very noisy, giving colour casts on some slides while not on others.

I've been thinking of ways to reproduce these digitally. I looked down the route of using a T-Mount and slide duplicater tube on my camera. With modern DSLR's its not always workable as the shutter may not fire if the camera doesn't get any feedback from the lens through the contacts when the lens is mounted and I've heard the results can be inconsistent.

My other option that I'm considering is to buy a light box, sit the slides on it and use my DSLR mounted on a tripod to shoot the slides. I'm hoping the consitent light source and using a good quality lens (either a 50mm or a macro lens) shooting at about f11 with low ISO will give me better results than using scanners in the past.

Does anyone else have experience with this method or have any other recommendations. It's a shame to have slides sitting there doing nothing.

Thanks,

Pete.

elven

Hmm, I just stuck a slide up on the windowsill, and took a quick snap with the canon 100mm macro - difficult to get the whole thing in focus and stright on to the plane of the sensor but if you could get your hands ona copy stand I think it could be workable...

There's a few discussions on various boards about it too, after a quick google:

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00HL3p

http://www.amazon.com/Opteka-Slide-Copier-Digital-Cameras/dp/B000EQ24Z4 (read the reviews)

http://www.edwardagnew.com/photogear/slidecopy.html

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t10108.html

Kilree

Yeah I was in the same boat with a load of slides just hanging around from my 35mm days. Fortunately I had a yashica slide copier from those days and with a bit of rejigging got it to fit to the front of a wide angle external lens which could be fitted to my old Nikon coolpix 880 (3.3MB). All I had to do was pop the slide into the slide copier point the whole thing at a white wall in daylight and take the picture. Results were very good and took a lot less time than scanning.