[Lord Lucan]

I'm aiming to buy a slide duplicator. There are lots on Ebay for around £20 made by independent companies such as Vivitar, Panagor, Soligor, Aico etc. I was a bit concerned however to see the instructions for an Ohnar, which said (even boasted) that it does not need any focussing because the lens aperture is small (F16) and therefore it has enough depth of field to give good results for any type of slide mount.

I think I would prefer to be the judge of whether it is sharp enough with no focus adjustment. In my experience of macro photography the DoF in close-up is tiny, even with small apertures. Are all slide duplicators fixed focus? I have old slides and negs in all sorts of mounts, or unmounted.

What is the experience of others here?

[steephill]

If you want a quick, cheap low quality way to digitize slides then knock yourself out. If you are using an APS-C sensor body you will need one of the zoom models. There are much better ways to do DSLR digitizing of film.

[Not a Number]

All the ones I've seen have some sort of focus ability.

The ones that are basically macro lenses that attach directly to the camera usually have focus and crop features. The ones that attach to the lens filter ring on a lens on the body the focus and aperture is mainly from the attached lens.If the latter have lenses in them they are basically close-up lenses.

[Lord Lucan]

There are much better ways to do DSLR digitizing of film.

What would you suggest? I know there are scanners but understand they are quite slow - I have an A4 document scanner and it is quite a wait just to do one item. I guess using a bellows arrangement and a macro lens would be good, but I have never seen a complete set of the necessary components on Ebay.

I have tried simply placing a slide on a light box and using the camera with a macro lens and extension tubes for 1:1. That was reasonably successful except that I was masking off the rest of the light box and doing it in near dark to minimise external light. Also the light box is old, uneven and flickering so I would need to buy a new one anyway. I thought a dedicated slide copier would mechanise things somewhat and make the process generally quicker and easier.

All the ones I've seen have some sort of focus ability.

This review mentions a Jessop slide duplicator that has focus adjustment :

The Jessop zoom slide duplicator - 35mm slide copier on a digital camera

[EssJayEff]

Well there's the PENTAX Auto Bellows K and Slide Copier K, which is out of production. Never used it . . . just sharing the information.

[JohnX]

FWIW the instructions for my Panagor Zoom slide copier don't mention focus per se, just magnification, but in order to set it up you have to rotate a collar in the centre of the device to the magnification/crop of choice - 1:1 - 2.5:1 - and adjust the main tube fore/aft so that it also matches the magnification choice. Surely this fore/aft movement must be focus adjustment?

In the Jessops article they call this focus.

[titrisol]

The old slide copiers do have focusing (moving the tube up/down) and zoom
I own a few and from my samples the Vivitars tend to be very good, Soligors and Spiratone are a mixed bag. I guess it depends on whoe optics they used

Using them is easy and its easier to do the focusing with LiveView and magnify to 10X

HOWEVER they begin at 1x magnification which is too much for APS-C cameras (need 0,67)
If you have a K1 it wil be fine or if you don;t mind losing a good chunk on the edges

The Bellows+slide adapter works fine as well, with a 50mm (I have the macro takumar 50/4) you need to compress the camera bellows to minimum and extend the slide-side bellows to achieve the 0.6 magnification

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Last edited by titrisol; 05-15-2021 at 08:15 AM.

[Lord Lucan]

The old slide copiers do have focusing (moving the tube up/down) and zoom ...Using them is easy and its easier to do the focusing with LiveView and magnify to 10XHOWEVER they begin at 1x magnification which is too much for APS-C cameras

I have a K-1 so copying 35mm slides won't be a problem. Looking at the used market however, I notice that there do not seem to be any that cater for using an APS-C camera. They all have (and brag about) magnification but none have the de-magnification that you would need for APS-C. As APS-C has been around a long time now, it surprises me that the likes of Vivitar do not seem to have catered for that market; there must be lots of people wanting to copy old slides with digital APS-C cameras, especially in the early days of DSLRs.

The market for new copiers/scanners seems to be dominated by what seem to be called slide scanners - free-standing units in a little box housing that convert straight to a digital file without a camera. I did buy one of those years ago and the quality was appalling, but maybe they have improved since.

Anyway, I have now ordered a used Jessops slide duplicator from Ebay. The Jessops ones look identical to the Aico ones, and they definitely do have a focus adjustment. There is a rather long-winded description of using one here http://http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/jessop-zoom-slide-duplicator-lens/ . Unfortunately he does not show any serious test shots with it, only the results of copying some rather poor (as he admits himself) snaps from 40-50 years ago.

Buying used, I realised that you need to check they come with all the appropriate slide and film holders. The Jessops/Aico ones should come with a twin slide holder, a 35mm film strip holder and a 110 film strip holder. I don't need the 110 holder, but many on sale seem to have lost one or both of the other holders too. What do people do with them?

[titrisol]

That looks good! --- Just make sure that you have the proper adapter if this is a T-mount
Those neg holders are easy to lose if you didn;t keep then together; but now is easy to 3-d print replacements!
Good luck

Most of these slide duplicators are left overs form the 80s and 90s where APS was non-existent and as such nobody bothered to modifyt them
I tried modifying one but it was more effort than it was worth after getting the bellows setup to work