What's the 'cheap' slide scanner?
Probably the cheapest slide or neg 'scanner' is actually a web-cam light-box. Normally a bit like an old slide view, its an LED light source in a box. you put slide over light source, but the a simple web-cam ca look at it, rather than having a magnifying glass 'view-screen'. Things typically cost under £50 from places like maplins or off e-bay, and they are, frankly pretty poor. Quick ad easy, but they aren't much cop. Mine I think boasts something in the order of 16Mpix resolution, which sounds pretty good, but its actually inflated by interpolation, the actual web-cam 'eye' s only something like 1.6Mpx, and ruining on dedicated web-cam sftware, it outputs JPG image files with a particularly low colour depth... its 'OK' and adequate for decent original images, and for web-display pics, when they are resized down anyway, and for dong a large number of negs/slides, it is reasonably 'quick and easy', but far FAR from all that great, and gets worse as the quality of original drops off, wither with muck, or scratches or poor exposure etc.
Dedicated film an slide scanners, are far better. I use a very old one, datig to Y2K; it only outputs at around 10Mpix, but on moder scanner software, I can use multi-pass scanning, and get very very accurate scans on very high colour depth, that are far better 'as is' and a lot easier t work with if the neg/slide s a bit poor or degraded.
Ironically, I bought a second one off e-bay a year or two back, because it came with a raft of additional carrier strips, and figured it would make for useful 'spares', and I only paid £30 or s for that... Ie as little as a chap web-cam scanner. These sort of devices don't have to be all that 'expensive', though because of age, I have to rn it o an old PC and windows operating system that wll recognise it's SCSI interface card!!!
Its not 'fast'... I scanned about 2000 negs year before last, and the stopped scanning as I needed to touch them all up, and it was, all told a mammoth task.... but for the 'occassional' roll of film I put through one of the 35mm SLR's and home develop, its not too much of a marathon! Be Fine for the 'odd' ca boot slides.
More modern dedicated film scanners that may hav a more common USB interface and be run on a more contemporary PC might cost around £100 on e-bay, and up, second hand... but probably are worth it, if you are worried about image quality.
Flat-bed scanners, and transparency adapters, I have little experience of, as far as I can tell they are better than a web-cam-scan, possibly rval some dedicated film scaners at the low ed, and able t possibly scan 24 frames in a pass, maybe a tad faster.
Slide Duplicator Lenses...... RIGHT.
I bought a slide dupliator around twenty five years ago, to make pints of all my Granddad's old Slides, that the family had never seen, as they'd all got bored by the time he'd set up the projector, or given up announcing the projector bulb blown!
Mine has an opeque filter n one end, a slot for the slide carrir, and a simple lens in the barl that has a camera mount on the other end. Attatch to camera, shine lght down it, take photo of what you see, its essentially a slide viewer for the camera, and only slightly better than a web-cam-scan by virtue of the fact you get the image on another bit of film, rather than a low quality CCD.
Mine was a Jessops own brand, basically one of the three generic offerings with Jessops name on the box. Usually came with a T-Mount on the end, so they could be fitted with the appropriate camera mount to suit. At the time, I used Olympus OM's so that was the mount t came with, but when I bought into widgetal SLR and got a Nikon, easy eough to buy a Nikon 'F' T-Mount and re-mount the duplicator lens to suit the new camera....
Ah! Problem... I only get to look at, or duplicate about 1/2 the frame!
My DSLR is an APS-C or 'Crop' sensor camera... so the reproduction ratio of 1:1 means it wont cover the full frame of a slide or neg... would f I had a full-frame DSLR, bt ot a crop sensor one..... here in lies a issue!
Duplicator boasts a 'zoom' function.. but that only lets me take even smaller crop sections fro the original, not get full frame coverage... some-one suggested I might be able to take the duplicator apart and turn the lens around in the body, to reverse the magnification... but I couldn't, at least not on mine.
This means that to get full frame coverage have to take perhaps 6 or 12 or more crop sections from the original to cover the whole frame, then do a panorama stitch i photo-shop to get a full-frame mage.... works quite well, as the pano-sections are direct tessellations not pans and there's no angular change between sections, also means that from 25Mpix camera, I get an output file something the order or 100Mpix!
The resultant stitch files, are a bit ho-hum ht and miss, first whether there's enough detail across the frame for the software to successfully stitch, and then how well resolved they are, depends o how much processing distortion the software introduces, over and above how good the capture was to start with.....
All told, ts FAR from a quick and easy job, in my experience, first, the light source, which for consistent I tend to use an LCD computer motor showing a empty note=pad page to get a white light Camera on a tripod to keep the light surce distance constant and even twixt sections, and then quite a bit of trial and error in manual, to find 'best' exposure settings vs ISO and shutter speed. (Apertures fixed).. and keep that constant across sections.
It works... and t works pretty good, and for the £10 or so price of a old dupliator lens, you may get some pretty good results, if you have the patience. And can be 'fun'! But, not as 'good' either for sped/usability/quality, in my opinion as a dedicated film scanner.
As they say, you pays your money and takes your chances....
The slide duplicator lens, for all my perseverance, was 'best' for digtising old 110 or even miox sub-mini negatives, which didn't fit the proper scanner very well, and would have come out at much lower pixel count, because of how small they are. On the duplicator, the small size negated the crop-factor ad let me get 24mpc camera-scans, of a pretty useful quality.. if some-what slowly, that was not too big an issue with small number of 110 and minox negs!
Otherwise, the ddicted 35mm film scanner is the 'go-to' device for decent quality scans of slde or neg; The web-cam scanner is 'quck and easy' and gets used to make 'contact print' sets, for preview sort of purposes, or for a quick laugh on farce-broke.
Duplicator lens? IF I want to make a high res sectional enlargement, ad have time ad patients to mess, well, it works and you can get good results with it, but its ot my go-to tool for much, really, and I am NOT investing in a full-frame widgetal camera 'just' so I can use it as a scanner! Given I seem to have taken more film photo's since buying into wdgetal, I would probably be better off using the spend to buy a better and more modern dedicated 35mm film scanner!
So back to you.... how much are you prepared to invest n cold cash and hard time vs how 'good' do you really want or need scans to be?
