35mm negatives/slides to jpeg?

[htony]

My wife and I have a ton of photos that were taken with a traditional 35mm camera (F100).   What is the best way to get photos taken with 35mm cameras to a digital format?  

For instance, if I shot some landscapes with velvia and want to transfer them to HIGH quality digital jpegs, what should I use?

Like this or better?

thanks

[Rob C]

My wife and I have a ton of photos that were taken with a traditional 35mm camera (F100).   What is the best way to get photos taken with 35mm cameras to a digital format? 

For instance, if I shot some landscapes with velvia and want to transfer them to HIGH quality digital jpegs, what should I use?

Like this or better?

thanks
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=158735\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Buy a dedicated film scanner. You might then want to use other than JPEGs, but there you go...

Rob C

[Tim Gray]

For purely archival/memorabilia purposes, I transferred about 1,000 slides to digital (could have done raw) just by "taking their picture" - I made a cardboard holder that I put in a bench vice that I could slide the slides in an out with a hole in the centre - put a sheet of paper as a diffuser and lamp in the background, set a custom WB, put a 25mm extension tube on a 28-135 - front of the lens ended less than an inch from the slide, was careful to get everything oriented and just took a picture of each slide.  This was in 2001 - so maybe the speed of slide scanners has improved - but you won't get any more economical or faster than this.

[wolfnowl]

I remember in the old days you could get a slide copy adapter that was sometimes sold in combination with a bellows unit.  Don't know if any of those are still kicking around or not...

Mike.

P.S.  Here's one for a Nikon Coolpix camera:
http://www.vistek.ca/details/details.aspx?...goryID=Scanners

[bertiep]

I have been archiving slides with very little effort by photographing them with a digital SLR and 100mm macro lens on a copy stand.

A flicker free light box is OK but I have been using a Bowens Illumitran 3S professional slide copier with the additional Contrast Control Unit.

The slides copy as fast as they can be inserted in the carrier and with an EOS 5D the results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals.

The Illumitran was an expensive unit at one time but I see them in the UK used market at giveaway prices.

Hope this helps,

Bob Paterson

[astanley]

I have been archiving slides with very little effort by photographing them with a digital SLR and 100mm macro lens on a copy stand.

A flicker free light box is OK but I have been using a Bowens Illumitran 3S professional slide copier with the additional Contrast Control Unit.

The slides copy as fast as they can be inserted in the carrier and with an EOS 5D the results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals.

The Illumitran was an expensive unit at one time but I see them in the UK used market at giveaway prices.

Hope this helps,

Bob Paterson
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=159256\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Bob, I'm currently doing this via the Nikon Coolscan 9000 method (read, 21 minutes per slide for a 16x / three pass TIFF), and the learning curve has been steeper than expected.  Have you ever compared a "film scan" to your method?  I get a great product, but the time commitment is pretty high.

Cheers,

-Andrew

[BradSmith]

The slides copy as fast as they can be inserted in the carrier and with an EOS 5D the results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals.

Bob Paterson
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=159256\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Bob,
How can any duplicate have "results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals".  

Brad

[Morgan_Moore]

Bob,
How can any duplicate have "results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals". 

Brad
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=159406\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I have done this too with a mulitiblitz slide copying flash and a comystand

If your pixels are smaller than the grain then you are 'exceeding to information contained in the original'

In tems of colour accuracy one may however not exeed the original

But the results are good

EDIT of course more information is not valuable information - you cant get info that isnt there

S

[Gregory]

we went the more traditional way.

we use a Nikon Coolscan 4000ED (with FireWire), SilverFast Ai and SilverFast DCPro (the latest versions). with 4000dpi multi-exposure, multi-scan and other SilverFast functions, the results are pretty good.

it took a few years to perfect the procedure, but we ended up mounting all of our slides and negatives and scanning with the 50-slide Adapter. we have the full-film adapter but it was useless. when scanning negatives, the Nikon scanner was incapable of accurately detecting the edges of the frames and automatic scanning of whole rolls of film was not possible.

one unfortunate note. Nikon no longer cares about its scanning business and has failed to update its scanning software, at least for OS X Intel. we have to scan on a PowerPC iMac because one of the OS X Intel bugs in the Nikon software prevents unloading and reloading of slides during batch scanning.

regards,
Gregory

[framah]

"results greatly exceed the level of information contained in the originals".

This statement sounds alot like what some salesperson would say to get you to buy something.

It also seems to ignore the basic laws of physics.

I don't care how small the pixels are. If the information isn't there, it can't be created in a duplicate. You can play with the image in PS and make it look better but a scan of an original will not give you more than what was originally there.  

[Rob C]

This statement sounds alot like what some salesperson would say to get you to buy something.

It also seems to ignore the basic laws of physics.

I don't care how small the pixels are. If the information isn't there, it can't be created in a duplicate. You can play with the image in PS and make it look better but a scan of an original will not give you more than what was originally there. 
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=160093\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

In fact, it´s the sort of dumb statement that makes you just want to switch off and never come back.

On further thought, it seems to be part and parcel of the crap that digital photography has introduced into the photographic vocabulary; not the semantics but the nonsensical claims of the new snake-oil salesmen.

Has nobody told this gentleman that matter can neither be created nor destroyed?

Rob C

[bernardd]

In fact, it´s the sort of dumb statement that makes you just want to switch off and never come back.

On further thought, it seems to be part and parcel of the crap that digital photography has introduced into the photographic vocabulary; not the semantics but the nonsensical claims of the new snake-oil salesmen.

Has nobody told this gentleman that matter can neither be created nor destroyed?

Rob C
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=160103\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I'm pretty sure that the OP meant that thee original slides don't hold as much VISUAL data as a 5D, not that a 5D creates data out of thin air. And that happens to fit my own observations. Remember that grain isn't VISUAL data. You probably need 30 or more mega pixels to capture the contour of each grain but that's not to be confused with the info that the grain tried to capture. In reality, none of my Velvia slides had more than 4Mpixels of visual data when I did the following simple test.
Scan at the highest resolution possible on a good scanner (Coolscan 5000 series).
In Photoshop, downsample (Bicubic sharper) the original image to various resolutions (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 MPixels).
Now save each image as TIFF, reload them in PS and upsample them to the original source resolution. Compare with them to each other and look for details in the foliage, sharp lines but not grain detail.