I have 150 slides from about 20 years ago. Having them scanned professionally would have cost over AU$1000 ($7 each).
I have heard people having success copying slides using a light table, which I don't own and didn't really want to buy. Experiments with a laptop display and iPad, made it clear that those screens didn't work as substitute light tables, as the RGB pixels were easily visible in the resulting image.
I then remembered that my wife owns a Kindle Paperwhite and it doesn't have visible pixels when the screen is showing a white page! This was my breakthrough!
So, having successfully and easily completed a 'scanning' of 150 slides in less than an hour, I wish to share my "Kindle Light Table" technique in that it may help someone else.
Equipment:
- Pentax K3
- 35 Limited macro, although any true 1:1 macro would do - just adjust the tripod to suit the focal length.
- Kindle Paperwhite set to 100% brightness and on a blank page of a book. (or equivalent e-ink reader with a backlight...)
- Table
- Tripod
- 3M removable 'magic' tape.
- Rocket blower.
It took about 30 minutes to finesse everything into a working position, but would be much quicker now I know the correct arrangement (see photos below).
- Camera set to manual focus, confirmed with live view magnification.
- M mode; ISO 100, aperture was f/8 (for sharpness and depth of field, as the slides are a bit wavy in their surface), shutter speed 0.8 seconds. (to underexpose slightly, to avoid burning out highlights, you may wish to use a different value)
- 3 second remote release. (or 2 second timer with shutter button)
- Shoot RAW, obviously, so you can make any desired adjustments later and fix up white balance if necessary. (Best white balance I have found to be daylight fluorescent.)
- Blow the dust off both sides of each slide before scanning with a puff from the Rocket Blower (don't blow them with your mouth!).
Set up the slide so that it's in a corner of the Kindle screen - this means you can quickly position the next slide. Move the camera and kindle around watching the live view of the camera to get the position perfect, then tape the kindle to your table to stop it moving. You could use a clamp, but I used tape as it was my wife's....
When positioning the setup use live view and make sure to get a small amount of the frame in shot, to avoid cropping the slides by mistake.
To remove the slides from the kindle, use a short piece of magic tape to pick up the slide by touching it's frame. Otherwise you bump the kindle's screen and it changes page - probably to a page with text, which you don't want.
Set up and sample result below. The results out resolve the original slides - my camera at the time only had a 35-70 kit lens, so it wasn't the best lens ever - this is visible in the 'scans'. So a professional scanning service would not actually get a better result from the original slides. The K3 delivers approximately 6000x4000 scan of the slide - which is better than 4000dpi.
Having 'scanned' all your files in this way, you may now conveniently view them on your computer. If there are any slides that are really, really important, then you may wish to have a number of them scanned professionally. At least now, you can easily view them all again and make backups! Image of the buildings is a slide scanned this way, and below is 100% pixel level crop.
Best of luck with your scanning project!
Last edited by calsan; 08-27-2014 at 06:06 PM.
Reason: More info