Transparencies: Scanning vs slide copying

[spidermike]

A comment of one of the other posts about scanning has got me thinking.
Before the digital era, slide copying was done using a slide-holder put on the end of a lens, but this seems to have fallen out of favour when scanners became more available - maybe because of the speed of putting 12 or more scans on one run. I have a lightbox and it seems an easy thing to riug up a solid holder for the slide to stand in front of it (with a tripod for the camera).

I am planning on buying the Epson V700 which can scan up to 4,800 dpi, but have been thinking again about the slide copier gadgets. The question is: will my Canon 30D (8.3mp ) give as good an image as a 4,800 dpi scanner? Will colour resolution be as wide (I presume so)?
I guess one consideration would be lens quality in the scanner vs lens quality on the camera  - I have a 70-300 IS zoom and I am thinking of getting a macro lens: if it is gives as good a quality as a scanner this could be justified    

A disadvantage of the copier as far as I can see is that if the slide is bowed, then not all of the slide will be ifully in focus when it is scanned whereas with the camera option you can set it fo f8 or f16 to get a good depth of field. Is this realistic or is it different for flatbeds and dedicated slide scanners?

Any advice welcome.
Cheers.

[Raoul]

I have a slide copier attachment and a V700 scanner.

Although I use the scanner mainly on medium format negatives, I tried it on 24x36 format as well. The scanner results are much sharper then those obtained through the slide copier and a Nikon D70. I believe this could be due to inexact manual focussing. I tried focus bracketing as well, things got better but the whole process became a hassle. If you only want to post pics to the web, both methods are acceptable.

35mm scanned using a V700 print nicely on A4 format (+- 8x11 inches).

[jerryrock]

Actually the Epson V700 and V750 have an optical resolution of 6400dpi.