![]() ![]() If so, that could be a huge advantage for the scanner. One probably-significant distinction is whether the film scanner in question has an infrared dust-and-scratch removal system, Digital ICE or the like. The overall PITA nature of the process had made me interested in the many user reports I see of people, some whom I really respect, who say that now a good digital camera, macro lens, and slide copier produce results that are at least at good if not better, in a small fraction of the time. On high quality settings, it take several minutes per frame. It's native software does not really play nicely with operating systems newer than Windows XP, so I fire up an old computer to use it. I have a Konica Minolta DiMage Scan Dual IV, a relatively late (2004?), pretty good dedicated film scanner (also an Epson 3200 flatbed with a film adapter). I guess different people have different experiences, and ideas about what is a pain, to work with. A dedicated film scanner is a much better tool for the job IME. Since then, we visited Boscastle and took some pictures.I found that setup to be a pain to work with. ![]() UPDATE: This building was washed away during flooding in recent years. Here is a reduced-size version of the finished result, a picture of the Pixie House (Harbour Lights) in Boscastle, taken sometime in the 1960s: To get prints from these digitized images, we’ll probably take the easy route and send them to PhotoBox. Once the pictures were all taken it was just a matter of cropping them on the computer. Each slide had to be perfectly square on to the lens to make sure it was all in focus. The lightbox provided a nice evenly-lit background, and the tripod and remote trigger avoided any shaking while taking the picture. The slides were not quite full frame in the camera, but not very far from it. The slide was kept in place with some sellotaped bits of paper! Once it was lined up correctly the photo was taken using the infra-red remote shutter release trigger. To get the slide as close to the lens as it would focus, she inclined the lightbox to about 30 degrees on top of a chair, holding it there with a pillow. Using a macro lens, a tripod, a lightbox, a chair and a pillow, Sue managed to get much better results than I had with the scanner. So, slightly resigned to the whole effort being a failure, and about to give up, I suggested to Sue that she should have a quick go at that. Somewhere I’d read that another approach would be to take digital pictures of the slides on a lightbox. The advertised resolution of the scanner is 1200dpi, but never mind. When the slide is only an inch and a half wide, 400 dots per inch is quite a lot lower than we were hoping for. It was at this point we discovered that the HP scanner hits some sort of resolution limit at about 400dpi, beyond which the results get markedly worse. It was fun to make, but gave no better results than just scanning the slides as they were. I did find a page describing how to make one yourself, so we tried that - it was rubbish. I had heard you could get slide holders for scanning slides on a conventional scanner, but couldn’t find out much about where to get them from. These things are quite pricey, and I actually couldn’t find one that was affordable and had Linux support. Next we tried looking at purpose-built slide scanners. ![]() The colours were really bad (far too dark), and the resolution was appallingly low. We’d tried the same thing with negatives before, with equally disappointing results. Of course the first thing we tried was scanning them using the trusty HP OfficeJet all-in-one, but the results were really quite disappointing. We discovered in the end that we had all the equipment we needed just lying around in the house! ![]() Sue has a large collection of 35mm and (I think) medium format slides and we’d been looking around for a way of getting some prints from them without giving them to someone else and hoping they’ll take care of them. ![]()
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