[yucatanPentax]

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Thank you, Mario! That does sound affordable and straightforward.

I do have one question: does the slide sit on top of the box where the opening is? Or do you place it inside on your tablet?

Thanks so much!

[maw]

I do have one question: does the slide sit on top of the box where the opening is? Or do you place it inside on your tablet?

Hi yucatanPentax,

Obviously the slides or negatives are placed on the surface of the box just above the cutouts (transparency lighting),

I forgot to say that between the slide and the tablet inside the box there should be a certain height/distance of about 10 cm,

as the display pixels should not appear as a point light but homogeneous, so as not to affect the image quality.

Ciao M.

[Lhorn]

I've been scanning with a $50 used Epson V500 I bought off a local classified. Overall I'm pretty happy with the scanner although I haven't blown up the pics. My biggest problem with the scans has to do with dust, water spots etc on the negative. I'll have to try some compressed air to see if I can't get them cleaner.
Anyone have a hint for not getting water spots? I've been doing final rinse with distilled water and squeegee with fingers or a squeegee for film negative. At least I've been able get rid of most of the dust spots in Lightroom, but I'd rather not have to deal with it.

[maw]

Anyone have a hint for not getting water spots? I've been doing final rinse with distilled water and squeegee with fingers or a squeegee for film negative. At least I've been able get rid of most of the dust spots in Lightroom, but I'd rather not have to deal with it.

Hi Lhorn,

Since the old negatives always present small or big problems also due to how they are stored, humidity, dust and on the other hand when the negative and/or dia,
are too dry the jellies tend to crack and consequently any excessively aggressive intervention leads irremediably to scratching and the formation of abrasions
in one case or mold in the other.

However, when I was still working in the darkroom I always used with old negatives and also for prints, a wetting agent. In general consider using it very carefully,
just a few drops in a quantity of water is enough (necessarily without limescale agents or deionized water should also be found in supermarkets or photo stores.

Instructions on the quantity can be found in the product, I'll put you a link to an Ilford product that you certainly know.
Everything obviously depends as said on the state of preservation of the negatives/diapositives.

Ilford Ilfotol Wetting Agent Liquid for Black/White Film and Paper

Let us know if you encounter any difficulties.

Ciao Mario

[Lhorn]

Anyone have a sense of how many Mp you need in a DSLR in order to match or better the quality of say, a V500 scanner? Lot of you guys are getting nice results from your 24mp camera but I’m in the low/mid teens with my older Dslrs

[UMC]

Regarding dust:
Dust is a pain, especially with flatbed scanners. Although the built in ICE dust correction of my V550 works pretty well and even though I blow off all my negatives before the scan with an airbrush compressor, I still find myself correcting 5-50 tiny fluffs, scratches and stains on every single TIFF. However, I should mention, that the majority of my negatives is 30-70 years old...
Important: Do not only blow off the negatives, but also keep the scanners glass clean and blow it off before every scan!

Regarding resolution:
According to the datasheet the Epson V500/V550 has an optical resolution of 6400x9600 dpi. As a rule of thumb you can at least reduce these values by half, as most of the test reports reveal that resolution values in scanner datasheets are tremendously exaggerated. I usually scan with 3200 dpi which yields TIFFs with ~3000 x 4500 pix for a 35mm negative, which brings us somewhere in the range of 14 Mpixel. Since I mostly scan films from the 50ies and 60ies, this is good enough to reveal the film grain! Maybe new material has better resolution, however, I think a 16 Megapixel scan/DSLR photo is good enough for any amateur purpose.

Regarding DSLR instead of scanner:
I used my good old bellows with the attached slide copier to "scan" problematic originals, mainly ones with extreme contrast. In fact, the K-1 has a real edge over the scanners when it comes to digitizing underexposed slides. But the dust problem remains and is sometimes even worse, as the DSLR naturally doesn't have any technology of dust removal as most of the scanners have.

[John in OZ]

I use a plustek 7400 which i have been using for many years. Original software with upgrade to the original version. Need to run as 32BIT though. Seems to do what I want. It's not too slow unless you have one of those high res images you want to scan in as high resolution.