Slide Copiers?

[zebulus]

Anyone here have any experience with slide copying?

For those of you who dont know, its the process of using a device that affixes to your camera and lets you macro focus onto a 35mm slide or negative to take a picture of it. This could be an effective way to get digital copies of slides, but it seems like the practice is kinda dead.

What say you Stovall/Wayne? Any of you veterans have any experience. I spoke with my dad about it. He said he remembered one made by Spiratone, but im sure they are long out of business.

[wclavey]

I have a Spiratone slide copier on an Olympus OM mount. Mine actually has a zoom feature and shift and rise so that you can crop a slide in addition to just copying it. The original premise was that you would use a flash with it as a light source when you made copies, but I found that it worked much better to use a bright window as the light source - - the contrast was much lower than using the flash.

[cooltouch]

I probably have the same slide copier as Wes, but mine says "Cambron" on it. Like Spiratone, Cambridge Camera marketed quite a few products under its own label. I'll wager mine is identical to Wes's.

I bought mine a few months ago off eBay for $15. It uses a T-mount, so can be adapted to most any camera.

I have used mine with my EOS XS, which is a crop-body camera, so even when zoomed out all the way, the image is cropped. Still, I have a number of slides that needed some cropping anyway, and it worked well for this.

I also own an Opteka slide duplicator. The Opteka is made to attach to the front of a lens, and comes with a couple of ring adapters, a 52mm and (I think) a 58mm. This style of duplicator often gets a bad rap, and it is entirely undeserved, IMO. I'll bet those who bad mouth them have never tried them. I ran across a comparison between the Opteka and a scanner on Flickr.com, which is what led me to purchase the Opteka. Here's a link to it -- you be the judge:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neelzito/2210576976/

I have found that one needs a lens of about 80mm in focal length for my 1.6x crop body, and that it needs to be able to focus fairly closely. A zoom works best because it isn't exactly 80mm for a full-frame image with my camera, just a shade less. I've been using an EOS 35-80 4-5.6, which is just a cheapo kit lens that came with the original EOS Rebel, and the 28-80/3.5-4.5 USM, which is the cheapo kit lens that came with the Elan II and IIe. Despite these being just kit lenses, they have done a good job, IMO, and render images that are noticeably sharper than those I've gotten with scanners. Full disclosure, however: I have not yet compared dupes with scans done with my new (to me) Epson 4990. But I suspect the dupes will still be sharper, because I've compared scans between the 3170 and the 4990, and while the 4990 has the edge, it isn't by much.

A couple of months ago, before I bought my Epson 4990, I cobbled together a webpage showing the differences between the Opteka, my Epson 3170, and an HP scanner that I bought and returned before buying the 4990. As you can see from the scans, the Opteka's are clearly the sharpest:

http://michaelmcbroom.com/photo/

I have found that duplicating slides works best for me if I aim the assembly at a white surface during bright sun. I have a white car, so sometimes I'll just use the car. Other times I'll use a piece of white poster board, and if there are clouds in the sky, I'll just aim the camera at the clouds.

What I like best about the Opteka, besides the quality of the images, is the speed. I can easily dupe six images a minute with the Opteka, where it takes about two minutes per scan with my 4990 at 4800 ppi.

Bottom line -- if you have a full-frame camera, get the Spiratone/Cambron. If you have a crop body, and have a decent zoom that focuses reasonably closely at the focal length you'll need, go with the Opteka. Even better, get both. :) Especially if you have a lot of slides to get through, this is the most cost effective way -- and one of the best, IMO -- of getting the job done.

Hope this helps some.

[johnastovall]

I've never done it but had a friend who started to use one for over a thousand slides and he ended up sending them to a service.

There are a bunch out there and I suspect for a low volume they work just fine.

Google on them.

[cooltouch]

Actually, they work quite well for not-so-low volume, too. As I mentioned in my above post, I can easily dupe 6 slides a minute, vs. 1 slide every 2 minutes with my scanner.

I'm in the midst of digitizing over 5,000 images, over half of which are slides, and I would still prefer to do it myself than send out the images. Mostly, it's a matter of cost for me, but it is also easier to maintain my archive's organizational integrity if I do it. I have over 3,000 35mm slides in my archive. It was worth it to me to spend the $50 on a duplicator to use with my DSLR and see how it would work out, since the alternative would be to spend over $2k on a service for images scanned at the same resolution that the camera can capture them.

Michael

[venchka]

Michael got it first. DSLR + slide copier.

The lens used is obviously critical.

[cooltouch]

Yeah, obviously when using a duplicator that attaches to the front of a lens, the lens used is very important. One of these days I'll get a better lens than what I'm using now, which presents a bit of a dilemma -- do I archive the duplicated images I've taken so far with the cheap lens, and say "that's good enough" or do I wait and dupe the slides after I have the better lens? I'll probably end up doing it all over again. Oh well, good thing it's all digital, and the only things I'm wasting are DVDs.

Michael

[arlon]

I've shot a lot of my slides with a silly home made holder/manual focus 55mm macro lens. I wasn't doing a ton of them and only wanted a few 4x6 paper prints. Camera/macro worked fine for my needs. If I where going to do 1000's of them, I'd just take them to costco and get them scanned and printed. I have a gallery with a number of those slides and my "cusom" fixture out HERE.

[cooltouch]

Hey Arlon,

I took a look at your duplicating rig. Actually, I like what you cobbled together. It's given me some ideas, in fact. I have a 55mm f/3.5 Micro Nikkor, and a EOS-to-Nikon AF adapter. It looks like I can remove the slide carrier from my Cambron duplicator, so I should be able to set up something similar. It should be fun to play around with at any rate.

Michael

[arlon]

I also had a few old faded ectachrome, I set a custom white balance by focusing on infinfty and it got rid of a lot of the color cast on those slides. You can see which ones where red in the gallery...

[wclavey]

Originally Posted by cooltouch

I probably have the same slide copier as Wes, but mine says "Cambron" on it. Like Spiratone, Cambridge Camera marketed quite a few products under its own label. I'll wager mine is identical to Wes's.

I bought mine a few months ago off eBay for $15. It uses a T-mount, so can be adapted to most any camera.

I've had mine since 1980... it, too, has a T-mount so any T-mount adapter you have will make it work on your camera... I thought the best feature was the zoom and the moveable slide stage to that you could crop - - I paid extra for that!

[cooltouch]

Originally Posted by wclavey

I've had mine since 1980... it, too, has a T-mount so any T-mount adapter you have will make it work on your camera... I thought the best feature was the zoom and the moveable slide stage to that you could crop - - I paid extra for that!

Yeah, back in the day I bought a cheapo Spiratone slide duplicator that had no zoom feature. I lusted after one of these -- the one you have and I have now. For me the price back then was the stopper. Just never could justify the expense, since it wasn't all that high on my priorities list. Then I turned around and bought a Canon FD bellows with the double cable release and the slide copier attachment (complete with roll film stage), along with an FD 50/3.5 Macro. Figured after that major depletion of my bank account, I didn't need the zoom duplicator anymore. Now here it is, some 25 years later, the bellows rig has been history for a long time, and I'm glad to have the Cambron. Life can be funny that way.

Michael