Slide Copier

[colin C]

I have been going through items in my loft and as mentioned in my earlier post regarding scanners, I came across boxes of 35mm and medium format slides and negatives. I have now ditched all of my commercial stuff (except my Ferrari images), but that still left a lot of family and personal images that I really needed to digitize. From members advice on my previous post, suggestions fell into three categories:

• Get them commercially scanned.

This appealed to me the most. Just box it all up and leave it to the experts. Enough companies were recommended and I did some further research to narrow down a shortlist of very reliable and professional companies. Then I checked out their costs and it was expensive. Probably quite reasonable for around a hundred 35mm slides, but add in the extra cost for medium format and quantities of thousands and the convenience of using a professional was outweighed by the costs incurred.

• Use a slide copier.

I had one of these many years ago in Canon FD days and after some research, found one on an auction site with Canon EF mount for £29. After a bit of trial and error I found a set-up that worked well: remote flash unit on an office shelf, remote trigger on the camera, for standard exposure slides stand in the middle of my floor rug, if the slides were a bit over exposed take one step back and if they under exposed take one step forward. I shot in RAW so that I could fine tune the results, but after my first trial batch of around thirty, I found I could just shoot away in jpeg and it was more than good enough. That only worked for 35mm mounted slides though.

• Buy a good quality scanner.

I had a scanner some years ago and wasn't that impressed with the results. Granted it was a relatively inexpensive Epson 1290, but I eventually gave it away. Nikon do a dedicated film and slide scanner, but even used, it's around 5K. Epson and Canon do a flat bed scanner with the right accessories for film and slides in different formats for around 1K and they have a high enough resolution to do a good job. Are those memories worth 1K to me? That's a tough call, so before I go that route I tried the auction sites. I decided upon the Canoscan F9000 MKII and used they are going for £500-£900, half that for the MKI version. After seven weeks of keeping an eye on them, I managed a little used, boxed, all accessories MKII version for £265. I shall probably only use it for this one exercise, but at that price, I should be able to sell it for what I paid for it, maybe even more. The cost of those memories have just become more reasonable and delivery will be on Wednesday.

In the meantime, here is a shot of my inexpensive slide copier and two images of my Escort Mexico from many years ago. One was scanned using the Epson and one was taken with the slide copier.


IMG_2199a by colin cross, on Flickr


Pim0005 by colin cross, on Flickr


IMG_2175a by colin cross, on Flickr

[John Liddle]

Thank you for your analysis of the possibilities Colin.

The second one looks to me to have the better resolution and/or be more in focus

[Trev B]

Agree with John, but it seems to have a greenish cast to it - or may be its my monitor

[ST-EOS]

The a noticeable colour difference between the two images of your very, very nice Mexico Colin, which image was made with the slide copier?

I have a CanoScan 9000F scanner though I'm not sure if it is a Mk1 or Mk2 it gives reasonable result when I've used it to scan old family photographs. The bits for scanning slides are still unused residing in the box that they came in.

PS. Is the Mexico still on the road?

[colin C]

The second image was made with the slide copier and the colour is pretty much spot on.

I no longer own the Mexico and with the benefit of hindsight and perhaps some maturity, I regret getting rid of the Ford AVO wheels for the Wolfrace ones. At the time I just had to have those Wolfrace wheels! :smile:

[John Liddle]

. At the time I just had to have those Wolfrace wheels! :smile:

And they say photographers get Gear Acquisition Syndrome!:biggrin::biggrin: