Railfan Technology > slide scanning with camera

One (at least one) slide seller on E-Bay utilizes a special slide holder lens attachment to shoot the slides with his camera. I see a couple of these devices listed in the B&H catalog. Are they archival, or just good enuf to list them on E-Bay? Comments???

I am also wondering what would be the best light source for these. Would definitely need to be color corrected at least I would suspect.

Again, Comments??

Rob

My experience from a number of years ago...

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,1580694

trainjunkie Wrote:
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> My experience from a number of years ago...
>
> https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?9,
> 1580694

Thank you. Interesting read and results. The chap I mentioned above says that the camera version is as good as the scanner version. I am not feeling the same, so far. I just don't want to invest a lot of bucks into something that is really not as good. I will agree that using this set up for selling slide on E-Bay is OK, but not for those frames that are valued more, ie: keep forever!

So, again, thank you,

Rob

Keep in mind that I did that test back in 2008 when the best camera I had was a Nikon D200. While scanner technology hasn't changed a lot since then, cameras sure have. I suspect a modern D-SLR with the dynamic range and low noise performance the current sensors offer will yield better results than my old D200 did. Will they be as good as a scanner though? A flatbed perhaps. But I still doubt that they would be better than a good quality, high resolution scan from a high-end dedicated slide scanner. It would certainly be interesting to find out if things have changed much since then, but I'm not about to reinvest in the equipment and time to find out.

Most of the older images I have posted on TO were done with a close-up lens on a Canon DSLR an extension tube from B&H, and a slide holder.

This arrangement is NOT the equivalent of a "real" slide scanner. But it's good enough to produce 1000-pixel images for posting here. And it's really fast, in that I always have the camera handy, while using the 5000 pixel Plustek scanner requires setting it up, getting out the laptop, watching the scanner take a couple minutes to do its thing, litening to people whine about my occupying the dining table, blah blah blah.

My DSLR produces a 4000+ pixel image, but even with an extension tube, I only fill about 2800 of those with an actual image. But that's plenty for this purpose.

As for a light source, I use the sky when possible, incandescent light bulbs if not. Auto color balance does a pretty good job of compensating.

Im struggling with this right now, have need to scan 200-250 images, and dont know weather to try Nikon 60mm macro to shoot the images with my D810 or go for Epson V800 flatbed scanner... Gotta decide quick as need to put together a show. Output is for digital slide show but these days those can certainly be 1920 HD if not 4K.

I used the Nikon 60mm with the extension tube and slide holder. The results were OK, but I thought the contrast and colors were a bit off. Maybe the best way to compare camera vs. scanner for me was that the camera produced a "duplicate slide" while the scanner (both flatbed and slide) produced and "original slide", but I admit I did not spend a lot of time on the project. I ended up using a slide scanner going forward.