Derek Wright
pfm Member
Vuescan is pretty good at OCR (Optical Character Recognition) of printed text.
I made my own, by taping a white acrylic square to the front of my Macro lens hood, and buying a strong daylight bulb. Blue tac the slide to the inside of the acrylic, focus and bingo. Once I'd played about a bit, the results were quite respectable! And it's freeIn the past I've used Minolta, Nikon, an Epson flatbed and Polaroid - the latter, when working well (with Vuescan) gave the best results. I loaned the Polaroid to a friend, and it's not yet returned, but I don't have a computer that could interface with it now, and the last thing i want to do is scan more slides.
I have a slide copier that I can attach to my camera, though I think that it will crop the slide as my camera has an APS-C sensor, though I'm not sure that I've actually tried it.
Paul,
A used Konica-Minolta Elite Scan 5400 is likely pretty cheap now. I used one for years and it's excellent with 35mm film — B&W or colour, negative or transparency — but it's as slow as molasses in January.
It's unlikely the bundled software will work on a newer computer, so whatever it costs be sure to factor in the cost of Vuescan.
Joe
I am playing with a Noritsu LS-600 scanner ATM. Here's a couple of old shots I have scanned.
I bought a Konica-Minolta Elite Scan 5400 ages ago and it is a great 35mm film scanner, though it is slow. I've also used a Nikon CoolScan IV at work and it's also an excellent film scanner and slightly faster.The 5400 is on my wish list (as well as the Nikon Coolscan IV RD) , but I can't find one for sale at the moment. I suspect they don't come on the market that frequently, but I'll be patient for a while and see.
Inspired by this thread, I've got a slide out (a deliberately difficult velvia slide that never scanned well) and looked at a few ways of reproducing it digitally, with my camera. I got my old Ohnar Zoom slide copier, but it suffers, as expected from the magnification factor of my APS-C sensor so, I can't capture the whole frame. Also, the quality wasn't as good as I was expecting. Great for picking out a small detail, but not great for the overview. Next stab at the problem was using my 90mm lens with an extension ring, but that was difficult to position, then I tried my Zeiss 50mm f1.4 with extension tubes, and that was ok, but bizarrely the best one is my Fuji 16mm with an extension ring which resulted in an incredibly close focus position but a really nice sharp image. I need to get a setup where I can control the camera angle and working distance from my lightbox, but the results so far are really as good as my scanners ever were.
Derek,Meantime you can be selecting the slides and negatives you want to digitize, I suspect that will be a bigger task than actually scanning the images.
Derek,
I was fairly ruthless in selecting and keeping only my best slides, so I will be scanning all of them. I've kept all my negatives, and many of the associated prints have been put in albums etc. so, as you suspect, sorting through these will certainly be the bigger task.
Paul
If you do buy Vuescan get the professional option, that offers free updates for life. I bought a copy when I got my first film scanner around 20 years ago and haven’t paid for an update since then.
Be aware that fast scanning isn’t really an option - particularly at high resolutions. If you’re scanning mainly colour negatives and slides consider a scanner with built in dust and scratch removal, it will save you a huge amount of time in post production.
eternumviti,I found it far easier to scan the lot, and do the sorting and rejecting once they were digitised and on screen. Sure, it takes a long time, probably 1.5 to 2 hours per film, but you find a way of accommodating it after some practice.