I'm too tight to pay best part of £200 for a scanner as well, ....well, I'm not.... I paid best part of £500 for one back in 2000.... would still be reasonably competent, if only I had a computer than still ran Windows 98!, so the SCSI drivers worked... AND I could be arsed to sit leaving it scanning four frames over night! I'm just too poor to buy another more up to date one!
As my film archive isn't likely to increase very much, I consequently I bought a 'cheapy' web-cam type scanner. It's actually not bad for £50; delivering I think 15MPix scans from 35mm; it doesn't have all the bolt-on features like its own LCD screen or anything, so for the money its one of the better of the breed. BUT I do get better scans from it than I get from ASDA! And pretty consistantly.
HOWEVER; and answering your question 'ish'... when I get a more challenging set of negs; I don't use a Macro-Lens.. I use a Jessops Slide-Duplicator lens.
I bought it, new, 20 odd years ago to copy a bunch of slides to Colour-Print, on an Olympus mount for my OM; but its actually a generic lens on a T-Mount. So, I simply ordered a Nikon-F T-Mount off e-bay for a tenner, and converted it, to use on Nikon Digital.
Mounted on the Nik; there are a few niggles;
First is its a manual lens; so no metering modes. But actually that isn't too big an issue. Exposing for a neg, meter would ref against 18% grey; however the neg was exposed for 18% grey on the positive, so will be 82% grey in the neg! Auto-Exposure would brighten up the neg and make for dark positive. A Scanner would calibrate for this and auto-invert; 'Camera-Scanning' you have the inconvenience of having to do a few bracket shots to get a ball-park exposure; take them out the camera, invert and colour correct in Photo-Shop; THEN go take your cam-scans, and use best settings from test.
Second; its a full-frame lens on a crop sensor camera; on Full-Frame 1:1 setting gave full frame for full frame... on crop, I have to shoot quarter frames, then merge the four shots in photo-shop... does give me scans of about 50MPix though!
Last, what you have taken off the camera is a Digital reproduction of the negative. To turn that into a positive, you have to get into Digi-Dark-Room and post-process as you would a wet-print.
Colour Negatives have an orange pre-filter to compensate for inherent blue cast in colour print paper; so you have to invert your image and dial out that colour cast, before manually adjusting your curves and effecting fine exposure compensation, as well as doing pnanorama merge to get a full-frame.
Its NOT a one-touch solution. BUT, it CAN be cheap. You can pick up an old Jessops Slide Duplicator for perhaps £10-£15, add T-Mount mount if needed and
you are in business for £25 or so, sort of money that wouldn't get you either a cheapy web-cam scanner or second hand multi-pass scanner.
Quality wise? You CAN get pretty impressive results off one, but very much dependent on your post-processing and correcting colour and exposure.
Duplicator has a 'zoom'; on full frame; 1:1 gives full-frame of 35mm, goes up to 2.5:1 to magnify a 110 negative to fill full-frame 35mm, or do sectional enlargement of a 35mm frame.
On my D3200, I get 24Mpix per frame. Doing quarter sections at 1:1 gives enough over-lap to panorama merge in Photo-Shop, which when merged & cropped, come out about 50Mpix or so. Detail that can be dragged off the neg at that kind of pixel count is quite remarkeable; though no where near what a high end multi-pass scanners seem capable of.
Using the zoom to do smaller sections, can boost the small detail resolution even more; and making 16 section shots to cover a frame, with over-lap to merge, can get you up to around 100-120Mpix images....
IF they will merge.
This can be a bit hit and miss, if the original neg is a bit iffy or you have large expanses of flat texture with no detail for the software to index off to over-lap sections. 1/16th sections can be hit and miss. 1/4 sections is a lot more reliable, but still not 100%.
I think that it's a case of practice makes perfect; but here's a quick comparison for you; from a set I posted in 'Photo's from Film';
Motorcycle II
This is a 'corrected' scan from the web-cam-scanner. Best I could make of a bad job. Negs had come out a tad dense. I was using an Aperture Priority AE Compact, on a bright day, and I suspect, on reflection that the camera ran out of higher shutter speeds and hence over-exposed. A bit dissapointed, I returned to the negs to see what I could get off them with a Duplicator Cam-Scan.
Using the duplicator and Nikon, and having a much greater degree of manual control, I was able to get a much better exposure, and pull a lot more detail back off the neg. Its Noisy for sure, but its not 'blown'.
Other frames off the same roll, if you look at the original post, probably more subjective which a viewer 'prefers'; but for the most part got a much higher degree of 'recovery' with the cam-scans, and on the full-res digi-images, much greater detail.
When I duplicated slides 20 years ago, I followed instructions in the box, to either use day-light from a window, or fire flash on a cord through the supplied diffuser. With the Digi.. I haven't got an off-camera flash I could fire from its hot-shoe without fear of frying its sync circuit! Possible solution was to use slave cell, triggered from the on-camera flash... but messy... so solution has been simply to point the lens, without diffuser at the LCD PC screen at a distance of about a foot... with 'note-pad' open (without any text in it!) to give a white light-box back-ground!
When I first experimented with this; Steve Smith offered some advice, in thread
'Scanning' with a Slide-Duplicator Lens. He suggested he had tried variouse light-box methods for medium & large format, and found it rather too much of a 'faff' and bought flat-bed scanner in pique, while offering some helpful pointers; and suggesting that a duplicator lens might be modified to give 1:1 on crop sensor by inverting the internal lens element. I have actually tried that with the Jessops Duplicator, but it seems that the actual elements are symetrical, and turning each element round has no effect; though might be possible on other makes.
There are also other methods of camera scanning; Following instructions in Dark-Room-Hand-Book for making inter-negatives; you put the camera on its back on the base-board of an enlarger, and project the negative onto the film... I have an old Durst enlarger, so I substituted CCD sensor for film, and gave it a crack!
VERY bludy ball-achey! To get full-frame on the sensor you have to crank the head right down to actually reduce image size; or do sections & merge as with the duplicator.However, in either instance focusing is a pain; I ended up teathering the camera to TV and using TV screen to see when I got focus / frame alignment. You then have similar issues with turning digital photo of a negative into a positive image.
With potential to crank the enlarger head up and make minuscule merge sections, I thought that the potential resolution would have been massive... unfortunately you run into that stitching issue, and I failed to get a full frame to merge from more than about 16 frames. If I was lucky I could get five frames or so to stitch of a detail crop area; but ultimately rather pointless, beyond about 100Mb Full frame, you are resolving the grain stricture of the halide emulsion!
Other method, again from Dark-Room-Hand-Book for making inter-neg, but not tried; is copy-projection. Using enlarger or projector to project image onto an opaque screen; say ground glass, then using camera on tripod to take a photo of that image from the other side. Given enough 'dark' room; this might be quite a good way to photo quite a significant enlargement of original, and not demand such a close focus lens, and might have slightly larger degree of 'tolerence' for focus, framing and tilt shifts... but probably rather tedius.
So the Duplicator Lens does offer a fair degree of convenience; holding negative square to camera; keeping it light tight etc, and being reletively compact and less fuss-worthy.
But; main thing is it IS cheap, and it can work, and it can work pretty damn well, IF you have the patience.
I have THOUSANDS of 35mm negatives... I do NOT have the patience to do them all this way! Hence I resort to it only when stuff gets tricky.
I have a few hundred 110 negatives; and for those; I have had 'some' patience; they come out pretty much 1:1 so no need to photo-merge to get a full frame; and cropped and corrected, I get something like a 17-18Mpix image off the camera, rather than the 5Mpix crop I would get from the web-cam-scanner.
If funds are tight; time available; and you actually ENJOY a bit of farting around in Photo-Shop... £25? And 50Mpix scans! And if you only have 30 odd frames to do at a time? What you got to loose? Give it a shot. Don't get on with it. Don't like it. don't get the results? Stick it back on e-bay! It is not a huge investment; and as I have found, useful back-up for a cheaper scanner, if you decide to go that way later.
