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Scanning Slides With A Camera Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

6 December 2013

A very long time ago we wrote about copying slides with a Nikon 990 and Nikon's slide copying accessory. It worked pretty well. But we never did experiment with a higher resolution dSLR. Until today.

Chart. We called it a G5-E6.

Cleaning up a corner of the studio, we ran across the old slide copying accessory and, desperate to take a break from our janitorial duties, we thought we'd shoot the USAF target with a dSLR. The result is shown to the right.

Our setup was a modest Nikon D300 with an old 50mm f1.4 lens mounted with a BR-2 reversing ring to give us a macro range. We put the slide itself in the old Coolpix slide adapter and aligned the two manually. Natural light for illumination. We focused using Live View.

That's not a perfect setup of course. We'd build a rig if we were going to do this for production work.

But we might. You can see the results, as far as resolution go, rival the OpticFilm and surpass the others in our OpticFilm 120 review, which we've updated with this note. Distinct lines are seen at G5-E6, ranking it at 2896 dpi.

Here's the table (G for Group, E for Element):

G0G1G2G3G4G5G6G7
E151102203406813162632516502
E257114228456912182536497299
E3641282565121024204840968193
E4721442875751149229945989196
E58116132364512902580516110322
E69118136272414482896579311586

The one hitch is that camera interpolates color while the scanners all have individual red, green and blue readings for each pixel. The chart is, consequently, not quite neutral.

Still, looks like we might have to build that rig.


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