One for the old folks among you all - I wanted to make something that allowed me to copy all the slides and negatives I have from years back. Not necessarily for stock purposes (although I suppose there might be some interesting ones in there) - but I just wanted to be able to look at where we had been on past vacations etc.

Here is my DIY slide scanning rig in all its glory:


And the full article on how I built it:
https://www.backyardsilver.com/2019/07/diy-35mm-slide-and-negative-copying/

Steve

Thanks Uncle Pete!

I've been playing with different exposures on this slide from 1980 of the Chateau de O in northern france. I think this was shortly after it was renovated. I used my base exposure which was that the white card just over exposes with no slide in the tray. Then I took two more at one stop more exposure to see if I could get better detail in the shadows of the trees using the blend to HDR function in Lightroom. As it turned out, it didn't make much difference over the standard exposure because there is enough latitude in the 100 ISO raw image to simply boost the shadows. There doesn't seem to be any increase in digital noise or film grain that I can see.

The original of this is 6000 pixels wide, which is far more than the resolution of the underlying film.


It is reasonably sharp, although I haven't got rid of the small dust spots in the sky yet. Maybe there is a demand for slides from the 1970s and 1980s? I just need to find the examples that show how things were different - unfortunately this chateau looks the same today as it did then, so what is the point of an old slide version?

Steve

...Nikon scanners or others with ICE technology were much better.

They are pretty good - not completely cleanup-free, but a huge improvement over manual clean-up.

I have a Nikon SuperCoolscan and am able to use it with MacOS Mojave courtesy of two dongles for the hardware connection (FireWire to Thunderbolt1; Thunderbolt1 to 3) and VueScan for software - Nikon gave up on drivers or software for their devices years ago and thank heavens for Ed Hamrick and VueScan to keep the device operational

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on July 29, 2019, 15:53

Quote from: PeterChigmaroff on July 29, 2019, 14:19

...Nikon scanners or others with ICE technology were much better.

They are pretty good - not completely cleanup-free, but a huge improvement over manual clean-up.

I have a Nikon SuperCoolscan and am able to use it with MacOS Mojave courtesy of two dongles for the hardware connection (FireWire to Thunderbolt1; Thunderbolt1 to 3) and VueScan for software - Nikon gave up on drivers or software for their devices years ago and thank heavens for Ed Hamrick and VueScan to keep the device operational

Yes, agree about VueScan. I thought it was very unprofessional of Nikon to drop support of their ubiquitous film scanners not too long after they ended the product line.

Yes, I neglected to add pretty much the same as you and Jo Ann, VueScan was the answer, and that was many years ago, I'm sure it's still the only answer.

As for technology, don't forget that XP has been unsupported since 2014, anti-virus probably 2016, so what else can I do with my old, still perfectly functional desktops and the hardware? Let me add a logical point, say that 30% of the world was still using old legacy systems in 2014. Hackers, criminals, whatever, are not going to waste their time and effort on a minority. Oh and lets move forward, it's 2019 under 5% of the world has old systems, which (am I being redundant?) the software and hardware still works fine! I have some software that only works on XP. It works GREAT!

I tend to rationalize that people trying to hack, steal, crack or whatever, are not interested in XP much, when there are much wealthier and lucrative targets running new software. What kind of person still uses and XP computer? I'd say someone who doesn't have money for something else, so they aren't interesting. 

Anyway, VueScan, which I have on that XP computer, with the SCSI cards and the LS-1000 works. And if I should fall into the same area, some day in the future for Windows 10, because OS life cycle is 10 years on average, I'll be remembering VueScan keeps up where all manufacturers, and devices, have been left behind. It's not just Nikon, HP and the rest have abandoned their hardware.

I'll save anyone reading this some searching. I hope the link lasts as well. Nt tested yet, if I find any problems I'll be back.

https://www.hamrick.com/files/vuex6496.exe

I WISH I could turn my mountain of old negs into usable material. 

Someday someone (like Nividia) may invent an AI scanner that will render crummy negatives and old 4x6 prints into full frame glory.  Might take another 10 or 20 years.  But I think it will happen.  It's certainly within the realm of possibility. 

I too discovered that old slides are not all that sharp compared to modern digital images.

Well, yes, but.... is that because we were less critical back then, so we'd shoot comparatively long shutter speeds to try to boost DoF with small apertures? Unless you viewed your slides using a projector you wouldn't notice the problem and even then, you were probably standing well back from whatever you projected on to.
I've certainly seen very sharp slides from back in the 70s (a pilot in the cockpit and the readings on all his instruments clearly visible) but my efforts were not so good.
Also, scanning or photographing a slide on anything but a drum scanner significantly degrades the image. The sort of ad hoc devices here won't do the originals justice and even on something like an Epson V600 you need to manually over-ride the auto sharpening and other lossy automations.
I think the reckoning was that a 35mm slide should be able to match a 12MP digital shot (though the latitude of film was another matter, the latest sensors are far ahead of what slides could do).