On 27 July 2011 16:00, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
I asked on this list a few years about negative scanning. The topic's come up again at http://saveaussiemusic.org/ , so I wrote this up:
I have quite a bunch of slides myself. And I was wondering how the slide scanners stack up against photographing a projected slide. Dark room, high quality screen, camera on a tripod, manual white balance, exposure bracketing. This should give decent results with a good SLR. Unfortunately I don't have my slides accessible right now.
With a SLR, there's an even simpler approach for slides - you can get a simple slide duplicator, which is not very much more than a tube with a lens mount at one end and a clip for the slide at the other. Once you get suitably even lighting behind it, you're sorted - slide in, click, next slide, click, next slide, click. The image quality, when I tested this, seemed pretty good.
Unfortunately, most of the duplicators on the market date from the film era, and so the focal length is off for a smaller digital sensor - it's going to give you a little crop of the centre of the slide. You could use a full-frame camera, if you have one lying around, or it's possible someone has made shorter APS-sized ones.