Hey Paul, glad to see you've finally found the light. For me, it was several months of frustration, trying to eke out every bit of sharpness I could from my Epson 4990, and even thinking that I should buy another, allegedly better scanner, and then one day I was on Flickr, browsing around and stumbled across a guy's photo comparison in which he compared a flatbed scan with a dupe from a "digital" slide duplicator. I was impressed. I was also able to do the math, and realized that my 10mp APS-C camera could generate 2700ppi images, which beat my 4990's claimed 4800 ppi (but actually about 2000 ppi) all to hell. So anyway, I bought one of the contraptions. Mine was an Opteka brand, cost about $50. It was basically a plastic tube with a slide holder built onto a flange on one end, and on the other end was 52mm threads (it came with an adapter for 55mm threads also). Somewhere in the middle of this tube was a correction optic. So, anyway, the way this thing worked was, you threaded it onto the front of your zoom lens and then zoomed and focused until you got somewhere close to a 1:1 image size of your slide, and shot the pic.
Well, right off the bat, I was getting frustrated with my AF lens focusing differently on every slide, and since its front optic rotated, that meant I had to readjust the slide back to horizontal. After a while, I set the lens to MF, and dialed in enough depth of field with the lens to make small focus differences immaterial. Well, the dupes I was getting with this setup were way better than what I was getting from my scanner, plus they were much faster to do, to boot. But one day I got to comparing one of these dupes with an original slide, and dang if I couldn't see that the dupe was not capturing all the detail of the original.
Well, this put me back to square one, and I decided to start over from scratch. I dismantled the tube, removed the corrective optic and the slide holder, so that all I had was a bare tube with 52mm threads on one end and a flange on the other. Then I went hunting for slide duplicators like I used to see for sale from Spiratone and the like back in the 80s. I found a Cambron slide duplicator on eBay for a few bucks, but it had the slide holder I wanted. One that was held on by metal clips and that could be moved up and down and back and forth. So I bought the duplicator and removed the slide holder, and installed it on the tube. I also had my eyes peeled for a roll film stage that would mount the same way, and found one on eBay as well, bought it, and then I had a way to dupe negatives and unmounted slides.
So to bring this into reality, I turned to my trusty old pre-AI Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 and threaded the tube onto the front of it. Then I added about 25mm of extension to the back of it, and mounted it via a Nikon to EOS adapter to my 10.1mp DSLR. The 25mm or so of extension gave me real close to 1:1 image size at the sensor. So, doing the math, I knew I was getting right at 2700 ppi. Here's a photo of my dupe rig. You see the lens with the tube attached and extensions on the lens, complete with a Nikon to EOS adapter, and then to the lower left is the slide carrier, and to the lower right is the roll film stage.
To shoot the dupes, I rigged up an old Canon 240EZ flash on a light stand, set it to about 1/16 power or so, and then just moved the dupe rig with camera attached closer and farther away from the flash. I found that, for ISO 100 and f/8 on the lens, about 12" was just about right. I found this to be the ideal rig for duping slides and negatives and subsequently duped several hundred. After a while, though, I cooled to the idea, reasoning that it would be nice to get results equivalent to a Cool Scan -- all I needed was a DSLR (or later a mirrorless) that would give me that sort of resolution. And that's what I've most recently done. I now own a Sony NEX 7 with a 24.3 mp APS-C sensor which provides 4000 pixels per 15.6mm. Doing the math, one quickly realizes this amounts to about 6500 ppi. Wow. Take that, Cool Scan!
So that's where I am now. I've just recently moved and am still unpacking my stuff from boxes, so I haven't had the opportunity to give my dupe rig a try with my NEX 7, but I suspect that, at that sort of resolution, I should be able to resolve Velvia grain. And if I can do that, I'll be happy.
Now, as for the quality of the output, well, I don't have the decades of experience that some of you guys do in the darkroom or working with drum scanners. I just look for things like detail, absence of introduced noise, saturation, truthful colors or good density in B&W, and I find that, if I've set things up right, I get truthful duplicates of my slides and negatives. Now as for hardcopy output, that's a whole different can of worms, isn't it? I've for the most part had prints made from labs that have those giant Epson printers or the equivalent, but I've been satisfied with this sort of thing -- for color at least. It would be nice to play around with some of the more exotic processes with B&W, but my B&W workflow is probably only about 10% of the total, so if I need prints, I'll usually have the above labs do it, or if I need special prints, there's a pro lab here in town that does a really good job -- for a price. But it saves me from having to go out and buy another enlarger and invest in all the other accoutrements and board up a room in my house
Oh, and by the way, I have no intention of getting rid of my Epson 4990. I find that, set to 2400 ppi, it does an excellent job with medium format slides and negatives. Plus I have a friend who has a 4990 and who regularly uses it to make scans of his 4x5 negatives, and I tell you what, it does an outstanding job with large format. So there's still a lot of life yet to be had with my 4990. I still haven't moved up to large format yet, but I do shoot quite a bit of medium format and just might decide to make the move one day.
Oh, and another thing -- about scanner software. I've tried Silverfast -- found its interface to be totally counter-intuitive and the results to be nothing special -- and I've tried VueScan -- had all sorts of issues with its clumsy interface, and once again, the results were nothing to write home about. So I continue to use Epson Scan and find that it does a great job in all but the most difficult cases -- and the most difficult cases are difficult because the images are so poorly exposed. So no surprises, there, really.
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