35mm colour slide photographing

[horrgakx]

Hi all. Having read some threads on here about what to do and what not to do with 35mm slide scanning, I thought I came up with my own low cost solution – but it doesn’t quite cut it and so I’m after your advice (and sorry in advance for the length!).

The first method I tried – using a flatbed scanner with a slide adaptor - was the obvious choice. I borrowed a Canon 3200 scanner and the results are good. However the process is extremely slow – I’m talking 5 minutes to scan one. No, I’m not kidding.

So, I thought about using a camera – my Canon 1D mkIII should give good quality and if I can swap slides quickly then I can get one done every couple of seconds. I know that you can buy a “lens” adaptor whereby one end fits to your lens and the other accepts your slide. This is called a Ohnar duplicator but costs about £70 (plus the cost of an adaptor) which to me is still a little steep.

So I had the idea of buying a small lightbox (which I got cheap off eBay) and laying the slide on the lightbox with the camera above it, photographing the slide with my 1D mkIII (aperture priority, mirror lockup, manual focus) above the slide on a tripod and use a remote release to trigger.

It works. But not well. You see, I don’t have a macro lens, the 28-300L IS USM can get close but the slide covers only about an eighth of the frame which means cropping it down afterwards and so loosing resolution.

Last night I borrowed a friends set of extension tubes to get very close – I thought this would be ideal – and it kinda is because it fills the full frame now. However I’ve found the focus to be super-critical and even at a high-ish f-number (f11) and focussed as best as I could manually, quite a large number of them were quite badly out of focus.

So I’m back at square one really. The slide-adaptor on the Canon flatbed scanner is far too slow, and the lightbox idea might be good but too fiddly and results aren’t guaranteed. I don’t want to buy a dedicated slide scanner.

Has anyone had experience of these Ohnar duplicators? www.kauserinternational.com
If its worth it performance vs price then I’ll buy it. But is there a better and cheaper way?


Thanks

[xi123]

I too tried all the methods you've suggested but in the end I picked up an Epson 4490 flatbed which also does 35mm and medium format. Works a treat!

The only problem with the Epson is that it takes up a fair bit of space.

[Bill Roberts]

I know you don't want to buy one, but a dedicated film scanner is what you need. I had a couple of thousand slides from my film days that were starting to deteriorate, and I ended up buying a used Minolta film scanner, scanning them in and then sold it at a slight profit. But the downside was that it took ages to do them all.

I can't think of a fast, cheap solution that will give you decent quality though.