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Scanning or copying 35mm film

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steheap:
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

Uncle Pete:
Looks good. The white card is important, the reflected light, nice touch.

I've had some Nikon Coolscan LS-1000 = 2,700-dpi optical resolution still have two, one for parts, kind of a problem and takes 2 minutes for a good scan, SCSI interface. It's in a box in storage.  ;) Wasn't good enough for Microstock anyway.

Here's what I played with last year: (a EF version)


Works OK uses a camera, so whatever I have is much larger.

But meanwhile, nice work, looks like a very functional unit. Only thing I've discovered after maybe five different scanners, from flatbed to the Nikon to a dedicated slide scanner... my old slide, in general, look like crap, compared to the sharpness and resolution of digital. If I had a super slide or two, that I really needed to have best quality, High Resolution, I'd send them out. Kind of the same as why I don't own a color printer except a laser printer. I can pay someone to do the best pro job, with pro equipment and not have to spend all the money, trying to work at the home office.

Now post an example please? Wondering how yours are coming out?

Here's one of mine, nothing useful or famous, 1982 on top of Stone Mountain GA - snapshot to digital, I'm happy. Sky is grainy. This was using the slide copier.

steheap:
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

PeterChigmaroff:
Dealing with dust can be time consuming beyond what you counted on. Having tried and tired quickly of this method and gave up on it some years ago. Nikon scanners or others with ICE technology were much better.

Jo Ann Snover:

--- Quote from: PeterChigmaroff on July 29, 2019, 14:19 ---...Nikon scanners or others with ICE technology were much better.

--- End quote ---

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

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