Hiya all, I wondered if anyone could tell me the best way of copying old transparencies? Cheers Paul
Hi Paul, Depends on how you define best, if you mean the best image quality, the 1st. option is a dedicated film scanner, 2nd. is a high res flatbed. Last option is the high street, but the quality may be lacking, but its fast and cheap depending on how many frames you have. BTW how old are the slides? how are they mounted? if they are very delicate maybe the flatbed would be best and don't go near the high street. John D www.celticgods.co.uk
Hi John, Sorry about the delay in replying. The situation is a bit complicated! The slides are about 40 years old, and belonged to a friend of my Dad's who died some years ago, and have recently been unearthed by his son while going through some of his old belongings. He contacted my Dad to see if he would be interested in getting copies of the photos as alot of them are of mountaineering holidays they went on in their youth. There are quite a few, and Dad said he probably wouldn't want copies of all of them. I think he said that his friend's son was planning to take photos of the projected images with a digital camera, and then stick them on a CD, but I'm not sure. He lives about 250 miles away, so it's not possible for him to easily see which ones he would want - he doesn't want to put him to any unnecessary trouble needlessly copying photos. Like you say, good quality copies will be fairly dear, so i think he really needs to see them to suss out which ones he actually wants. Cheers for your help Paul --
I scored on old HP Photosmart S20 for about $40 on auction. Does slides at 2400dpi which is fine for old slides. Most of our slides were not real sharp even though taken over 30 years ago with a Zeiss lens. I scanned a heap of these really old slides and put on cd. The hard part is if the slides are dirty or have fungi on them. A tin of compressed air is essential but no miracle worker. Photoshops Healing Tool or Clone Brush is a help. D.R.
See if you can find a second-hand film scanner (see post from D.R.), Canon FS4000 or a Nikon. Either of these will do a cracking job. The idea of projecting the slides then taking digi photos is not realy that sucsessful, I've seen it done some years ago and the results were not that pretty. Regards John D. www.celticgods.co.uk
