McGyver'd filmscanner

[jev]

I was digitizing a couple of negatives yesterday evening when the stupid scanner stopped working. It has been flaky for a couple of weeks already, but nothing I could not repair. This time however, it was beyond repair (one of the stepper motors burnt out and replacing it with a new one just is too expensive for this thing).

The problem is, we had to put down one of our pets last friday and my wife wants almost all pictures we have from him (a couple of hundred!) digitized so they can be shown on a digital frame. I, on the other hand, do not want to invest a lot in a new scanner.

So, I was thinking to McGyver something. Got an old enlarger that I can cannibalize, was planning to at least use the filmholder and maybe the diffusor system from that. Mount it on a fixed setup somehow with a camera so that I could simply take pictures of the negatives. Did anyone create such a thing before? Any pointers or any experiments in this direction that you want to share experiences with?

[Krzys]

Most people don't have too much success taking pictures from a slide projector and this is not much different. :confused013

EDIT: Wait I read it wrong. Are you saying that you want to take photos of the negative up into the enlarger's light source?

[jev]

EDIT: Wait I read it wrong. Are you saying that you want to take photos of the negative up into the enlarger's light source?
Well, there's this guy (http://www.foto-expositie.nl/tips.html) that seems to get great results from simply shooting images from his negatives placed on a lightbox. His results look pretty good at first sight but I don't have too much confidence in the reproducibility of his methods.

So yes, I originally was thinking to have the image projected on the sensor using the enlarger. That didn't really work too well (it's hard to get that sharp!) so I thought to use parts of the enlarger to create a fixed setup, basically using the methods shown above but provide improved reproducibility.

[Krzys]

Keep in mind that I managed to get a half decent film scanner for $100.

Its just that the film holders suck. You really have to buy some ANRglass.

[jev]

Keep in mind that I managed to get a half decent film scanner for $100.
I'm not convinced I can live with "half decent" ;)

I've been looking at the cheaper film scanners, but they just don't cut it. The Canon 8800f for example looks pretty nice on paper but several tests show it underperforms big time - and that thing costs a lot more than $100. So, what film scanner did you talk about?


Its just that the film holders suck. You really have to buy some ANRglass.
Another reason to cannibalize the enlarger: good film holder (fits MF too) and ANR glass :)

[Krzys]

My Canoscan 8400f cost $100. I can live with it, but life is very painful.

I got a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 for $15. Just need a SCSI. From what I can see the DPI may be lacking but it makes up in sharpness.

[jjphoto]

I did a quick test shooting a 120 (6x6) tranny film on a light box and with a Canon 1dsmk2 with a Canon 100/2.8 Macro.

The quality of the scanned image looked excellent but you do need to keep the film flat which was the only real problem I found, not to mention the usual dust problems. Using an enlarger film holder, preferably with Anti Newton Glass is the way to go.

As I said, it was just a quick test, but I will be using this setup (with film holder, to scan the rest of my stuff.

JJ