[Briangoulding]

March 22, 2011 at 3:03 pm

I have used a USB plug in special slide scanner (€95) which was very poor. Slides are in good nick but you wouldn’t know that from the scanned version. I bought a lens mounted slide copier (Opteca). I used to own a slide copier inclusive of the lens which gave clear image on SLR camera and worked really well. But the current copier is a plastic extention which is screwed into the lens. So far, I am only getting poor image results. The resoultion is determined by my SLR camera rather than a scanning device but the image isn’t great. Many practical problems here – I am using bright daylight clouds to back light the slide so not so flexible as regards when I can use it; also lens is maxed out at 80 and that’s not enough to get in close to crop the slide or even see if I am fully focused; and lastly, I find the slides captured on my camera don’t produce a very lively image on my computer. The same equipment is able to capture negative strips but it’s hard to feed in the plastic slips into the narrow space. And I am not impressed with the colour that is recovered from negative film. I wonder if there’s someone who has better route to digitalising these old images. Thanks.