[jeztastic]

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Hi, I'm thinking of setting up my K10D to scan my negatives. Local camera shop costs an arm and a leg.

I was thinking or rigging up something with a skylight filter. Attach a kitchen roll inner tube to the filter, and a negative carrier at the other end. Use it with the Sigma 24mm as it is sharp and has good close focusing.

Anyone else tried this? Any hints or ideas?

Thanks!

Jez

[cats_five]

I have no idea if you will get a satifactory result this way, but how many negatives do you have and how long can you bare fiddling around with old kitchen towel tubes and the like? This sounds like the Blue Peter method of scanning.

[aurele]

you can find on ebay for exemple some "slide copier" (see Asahi Bellow (m42 mount) or pentax slide copier.) wich looks like and consist in a Bellows on wich you put a 50mm lense, and have a slide holder. In fact you do some macro pictures of your neg

[jeztastic]

you can find on ebay for exemple some "slide copier" (see Asahi Bellow (m42 mount) or pentax slide copier.) wich looks like and consist in a Bellows on wich you put a 50mm lense, and have a slide holder. In fact you do some macro pictures of your neg

Thanks, that's the kind of thing I was after... I was searching using the wrong terms... Interesting, but the ones that are any good are expensive (for me anyway...) This is gorgeous though.... Yum...Asahi Pentax MACRO BELLOWS II & SLIDE COPIER

I think I will try out my 'Blue Peter' version first... I'm not looking at scanning a back catalogue, just the negatives I want to use when they come back from developing.

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Last edited by jeztastic; 08-07-2011 at 01:48 PM.

[aurele]

you welcome (i was looking for the same thing a week ago )

[cats_five]

If you get a slide copier, check to see if the slide has to be mounted. The ones I have seen it does, and cutting up negative strips to mount individual frames isn't recommended.

[ptxbillyk]

If you can afford to own 2 Pentax DSLR, surely you can afford a proper film/slide scanner. Try one of those in the Canon 86xx series. You should get more fun and better results using a scanner built for the job. Before I bought my Canon 8600F, I tried projecting my slides/negatives on t my screen with an old slide projector and then snapping the images with a P&S. For properly exposed films/slides, I could get reasonably good results. But they were no match against those done with my Canon 8600F later.

[gtxtom]

Here's a Youtube video from DigitalRev about scanning negatives with a dSLR.

You Tube

You Tube

[jeztastic]

If you can afford to own 2 Pentax DSLR, surely you can afford a proper film/slide scanner.

No. I really can't. And who said I owned two DSLRs? A film scanner is out of my budget of... Nothing. And I already overspent my budget by £10 buying some extension tubes to turn one of my lenses into proper macro. Plus are those scanners capable of scanning in 10Mp RAW?

Here's a Youtube video from DigitalRev about scanning negatives with a dSLR.

Thanks... That's what gave me the initial idea! I want to improve on that though... He must be letting a lot of light in like that.

[tuco]

:

Plus are those scanners capable of scanning in 10Mp RAW?

With VueScan scanning software you can scan to a DNG file. It really is a TIFF-DNG because it's not the exact same data as digital RAW file.

Nevertheless, you can open it up with a RAW editor that supports reading a partial implementation of Adobe's DNG spec (Lightroom for example) and adjust it nicely. The MP you get depends on the resolution you scan at or your scanner is capable of scanning at. Flatbed scanners report way more resolution than they can optically deliver. And more expensive dedicated film scanners are capable of near 4000dpi optically or more for very expensive ones.

A 2400dpi scan will produce an approx 2256x3408px size image and about 3760x5680px for a 4000dpi scan of a 35mm negative or positive. Shoot medium format film and those numbers increase significantly.

[jeztastic]

Thanks, very useful post Tuco... I will look into it... I'm starting to dream about medium format... No doubt that will be on the list one day too...

I am unsure about dpi as a resolution measure, not used it before. How do the figures above compare to what I'd get from the K10D?

Thanks again.

[tuco]

Thanks, very useful post Tuco... I will look into it... I'm starting to dream about medium format... No doubt that will be on the list one day too...

I am unsure about dpi as a resolution measure, not used it before. How do the figures above compare to what I'd get from the K10D?

Thanks again.

Open one of your K10D files and see what the pixel size is. But for the 2400dpi/4000dpi scans I noted equate to about 7.6MP and 21.3MP respectively. But you really can't equate the image quality of a digital camera file to that of a film scan file based on MP alone.

I used the 2400dpi number because that is about what most flatbed scanners are capable of optically and 4000dpi if you could afford, say, a Nikon Coolscan. Really high end scanners can cost so much that you might as well buy a medium format digital camera such as the 645D or H4D-31 and save money.

[jeztastic]

Open one of your K10D files and see what the pixel size is. But for the 2400dpi/4000dpi scans I noted equate to about 7.6MP and 21.3MP respectively. But you really can't equate the image quality of a digital camera file to that of a film scan file based on MP alone.

I used the 2400dpi number because that is about what most flatbed scanners are capable of optically and 4000dpi if you could afford, say, a Nikon Coolscan. Really high end scanners can cost so much that you might as well buy a medium format digital camera such as the 645D or H4D-31 and save money.

Hm, interesting. 3872x2592dpi for the K10D files, which makes sense given your figures. I'm still not 100% sure I understand your previous comment about medium format film "increasing the numbers significantly" though. Surely the dpi will remain constant whatever the size of the negative? Although I understand picture quality and file size will increase...

Anyway, it seems it's still worth my pressing ahead with rigging something with the K10D. If the results are unimpressive, picking up a cheap or second hand 2400dpi scanner is also an option, given that it there is software available to produce RAW files.

[tuco]

...
I'm still not 100% sure I understand your previous comment about medium format film "increasing the numbers significantly"

There are many different camera formats in medium format each projecting a different size image on a 120 roll of film. For example, there is 6x4.5 (aka 645), 6x6, 6x7, 6x9 and more. These represent the size of the image frame in centimeters. But they are rounded off. Actual frame size is slightly less with the long dimension varying a few millimeters from one camera manufacture to another.

That being said consider a Pentax 6x7, for instance. It's reported image is actually 55x70mm (=2.17x2.76 inches). So if you scan that at 4000 dots per inch (actually its spi but scanning software usually says dpi) you get an image (2.17 * 4000) by (2.76 * 4000) = 8680 x 11040 pixels.

Anyway, it seems it's still worth my pressing ahead with rigging something with the K10D. If the results are unimpressive, picking up a cheap or second hand 2400dpi scanner is also an option, given that it there is software available to produce RAW files.

It takes really high scanning dpi to get the most out of 135 format (not just for file size but quality of the image too) whereas an inexpensive flatbed scanner does a much better job with medium and large format sizes.

[jeztastic]

OK. So it looks like there is some misuderstanding of the term dots per inch on my part. 3872x2592 isn't a DPI, it's a size in pixels. Think that's clear...