On Wednesday, April 19, 2017 at 4:52:25 AM UTC-4, Noons wrote:
On 18/04/2017 11:17 @wiz, -hh wrote:

Set up the slide projector at home, with a dSLR on a tripod next
to it ... project, click, project, click ... this is a quick &
dirty way to get a halfway decent quality image quickly, which
is better than nothing.

The slight snag in that technique is that it only works with slide film.

Pragmatically, true enough.

And it only works for those slides for which have been mounted.

I raise this point because for a lot of my old UW photography images,
the local ("next day") E6 processing was done by hand and you got
back the uncut strip, unmounted (the service of slide mounting simply
wasn't offered at these dive resorts & Liveaboards,

But because the overall photgraphic yield was also typically quite low,
it wasn't considered to be a particularly big deal for the photographer
to spend an hour at a light box and cutting up the strips by hand and
hand-mounting the ~4 keepers per roll. Plus, it was slightly cheaper.

In retrospect, the savings was trivial, but at the time, a couple of bucks
per roll, times 20 rolls would pay for another full day of scuba diving.

Colour negative and b&w are simply impossible to use for this.
And they are by far the largest amount of film still used - at least in
my case.

I'm perfectly happy with the Coolscan 9000 I got many years ago
and the Plustek Opticfilm120 a couple of years ago.
For the Nikon, I reckon Nikonscan works fine with slides.
But for b&w and colour negative, vuescan walks all over any other
software on both scanners. I won't even mention the utter crap that
comes with the Plustek and makes it so much more expensive as a
result... If only Plustek woke up and started shipping that scanner
WITHOUT that included software, they'd have a product $500+ less
expensive...

I have tried a slide duplicator with a digital camera for slides but am
not happy with all results. The max rez digital camera I have is
16Mpixels and that is not enough for some of the best images. It also
does not have any way of using infra-red scanning for elimination of
scratches and such. Keeping things sufficiently flat is also a huge
challenge. But it does a satisfactory job for average slides - that are
the majority of the stuff I have on that film base.

What I've found that it really comes down to is that it is
still a challenge to make the time to grind through the film
collection, and when I finally do, two things hold me up:

Indeed. Line scanners are all very slow and no one has done a good job
of using a simple digital camera sensor scanner. Even though it should
be relatively simple to get a good 20Mpixel scanner system based on
those and not necessarily over-expensive. Not sure about the infra-red
scratch removal, though.

The few scanners around that use digital sensors are useless in that
they barely reach 5Mpixels in rez, have poor focusing systems and
flatness support and produce results only as jpgs instead of RAW. That
makes them useless for any needed post-processing adjustments.

My brother has one of these and their general appeal is similar to
the slide projector process I mentioned: they're a "quick & dirty".
For some people (& uses) that's adequate, but when the user is more
meticulous, there's going to be a lot of time spent in post-processing
no matter what, so starting with a better scan becomes more beneficial.


-hh