Why scan at all if you have a digital SLR?

Hi,
I need to make my 135 and 120 slides digital.
After reading a lot of scanning and scanners the following question came into my head:

Why use a slow scanner with cheaper lens if you have a good digital SLR?

I remember some 30 years ago when I had a Canon EF with bellows FL. To that could a slide holder be connected and there was a matte glass to light the slide from a suitable light source.

What do you think about macro photographing of the old slides and negatives with a digital SLR with a good macro lens? Instant result with RAW files!

Is it a bad idea and why?

I think what you'll find is that the DSLR can't handle the density range in most slides (E6). You'll get something it may just not be acceptable in all cases. Depends on what you're going to be using the final results for too.

This is actually a great technique to quickly digitize old slides. I got a (FH-3 ???) nikon holder, put a canon adapter on the back and a nikkor macro lens on the front. I use a Canon 5D and shoot into a light box on manual exposure mode. The quality is amazingly good and a sh**load faster than scanning. I suppose for any critical work, I would go ahead and scan, but for making some quick digital family albums, this technique can't be beat, IMO.

Johan_Forssblad said:

Hi,
I need to make my 135 and 120 slides digital.
After reading a lot of scanning and scanners the following question came into my head:

Why use a slow scanner with cheaper lens if you have a good digital SLR?

I remember some 30 years ago when I had a Canon EF with bellows FL. To that could a slide holder be connected and there was a matte glass to light the slide from a suitable light source.

What do you think about macro photographing of the old slides and negatives with a digital SLR with a good macro lens? Instant result with RAW files!

Is it a bad idea and why?

Click to expand...

Before I had a scanner large enough for 8x10" negs and transparencies, I used to use my Coolpix 990 to digitize formats I couldn't scan for the web and even to make postcards for four-color offset printing. The contrast was usually lower than a scanner, but with some adjustment the results were surprisingly good. A DSLR with a good macro lens and good copy technique, proper alignment, and such, should produce good results. Museum copy work is more often done with cameras and high-end digital backs than with scanners, if only because the originals are too large to scan.

I still use my Coolpix 990 on a copy stand for digitizing documents. The resolution is enough for OCR even with high JPEG compression, and it's way faster than using a scanner, particularly if I have a few hundred pages to PDF. I was thinking of switching to a DSLR, but they seem generally to have minimum file sizes that are too large for this purpose.

Why scan at all if you have a digital SLR?

Click to expand...

Resolution, tonal range, size.

If I should use a DSLR to digitize my slides I could as well switch completely to digital. But there is no digital cam or scan back that can produce 130 megapixel images with a tonal range as my 6x9 slides and the Coolscan. Even those with only 50 megapixels resolution are far too expensive to be economical for a 'normal' photographer, studio, etc.

Last but not least it wouldn't make sense to use a Velvia 50 and digitize the slides with a digicam.

For web presentations it might be ok.

Good things need time. Excellent results need even more time. In any business. I'm not under pressure, so I have the time to scan. It's amazing how much detail you get with a good scanner.

In fact I have a relative in the fashion photography industry.
The guy works with retouching by hand and the computer way.
He told me that it was common that they made paper prints from MF digital
camera files.
Then they put the print on a scanner to scan it, this way they achieved a more analog looking image.
Work flow= Digital camera - retouch - scanning - final retouch - final print !!!!!

Sounds crazy to me :0)

/Stefan
StockholmViews.com