'Scanning' with a Slide-Duplicator Lens

[Teflon-Mike]

OK, novel little experiment today....

Twenty years ago, I bought a Jessops, Pan & Zoom Slide Duplicator lens for my OM10. It turned up last week, up in the loft, while I was looking for something for my daughter.. And I had a wonder... a wonder that saw me hold it up against the Nikon Digital, and to see if I got anything from it... I did, and knowing it was a stock lens on a T-Mount, ordered an adapter to re-mount to the Nikon, properly, which arrived this morning.

Calibrated to copy at 1:1 on full frame... on crop sensor D3200, at 1:1 it reproduces at the same magnification as 1.5 did on the full-frame, so I could just about squeeze a 110 neg into the frame, but I was only ever going to get sections of a 35mm.

BUT.... in order to make sectional crops; the duplicator has a panning slide holder... so I reckoned, that If I was smart, I could take four pictures, quartering the original 35mm frame, and as they were all taken at the exact same angle in the duplicator, they would stitch rather well, in Photo-shop panorama merge.

This is the first shot at proving the theory then. took nine shots to cover the entire 35mm frame, not the anticipated 4. Then stitched in PS5, cropped down to that after taking the neg-holder out of the image, at aprox 7,ooo x 10,ooo pixels or 70MPix! (re-sized here to 900x600ish)

Just for note; Neg. Edge Says Kodak Gold 200. And I have no clue as to what camera it was taken on, let alone lens or apature and stuff. Negs just happened to be to hand and were pulled out of a draw and left with me after my Gran died... thirteen years ago! Subject is my Gran and my Dad, and I suspect that it was taken in Vancouver, probably around 1982 or so.

OK, tighter crop, about 1/4 frame and re-sized, I got this, which still had a larger pixel count than my camera.

Cropping tighter still, and at original resolution, unsized here, we have close up detail of the camera my Dad had round his kneck. (Any-one know what it was?)

Hmmmm.... looks rather 'soft'... and zooming in, it is.... its 600x400 pixels but it LOOKS like 75x50! it's re-pixilated, as though its a low res enlargement, each original pixel re-made in blocks of 8x8!

Intreguing! So.... my 70Mega-Pixel montage... is actually only about the resulution of a 10MPix original!

Lets look at one of the original section shots...

Hmmm... well that's roughly the same crop, and you might be able to better ident the camera from it! Again, its original res, at about 400x600 ish, but no pixel blocking.......

 

[Teflon-Mike]

OK, lets go back and try again. I cant get a full-frame dupe; so lets see what I can get, 1:1, by way of the first crop.

Straight 'optical' dupe... hmm... re-sized here, of course, its not a lot different, though increasing exposure half a stop, I have seem to have got a better exposure & colour balence using auto-re-expose.

OK, lets have a look at that camera again. How tight can I get in with the optical zoom on the duplicator?

Not an awful lot by the looks of it.... but what about as shot resolution crop on that camera?

Hmm... maybe I didn't quite crack the focus! better rendering, I think, but not as much defanition.

SO... conclusion of experiment:-

1/ The Slide Duplicator CAN be attached to the Nikon and it can lift an image from a negative.

2/ Guessing the exposure I wasn't far off, but inverting and removing negative colour cast? Well, my histograms were a tad compressed, so obviously room for practice to perfect.

3/ Shooting & merging sections DID work.... and was marginally more successful than the bendy panorama stitches with mixtures of disembodied or repeated, or repeated and disembodied people in them!

4/ BUT, the Super-High resolution digitised photo I was hoping for hasn't quite been realised. I got a 70Mega-Pixel image...... but with pixel clumping, apparently created during stitching... really only worth 10Mega-Pix, if that!

5/ Without stitching, camera resolution crops, seem pretty detailed, and are worth their 24Mega-Pix.... if I can get the exposure & colour casting a bit better sorted, and I can be a bit more careful with my duplicator focus.

So..... is this a viable alternative to a top flight scanner? THIS is the real question.

Well... idea of using the pan and sections to stitch together optical enlargements that would give a pixel count few scanners could achieve..... is probably dead in the water I think. Photo-Shop just doesn't do the job well enough, creating this block pixelation.... UNLESS that was due to experimental error, or an anomoly of my image.... any suggestions on this one greatfully recieved!

Getting 'better' 1:1 full frame scans out of it? Than my Sub £100 web-cam type film scanner?

Well mines not such a bad one as the real e-bay cheapies; but its a long way from great. I get full frame images from it, 5,200 x 3,400 in 24bit colour. It's a tad lower res than the Nikon, but close enough, and while optically its not wonderful, neither is the Jessops Slide Duplicator lens!

However; full frame 'scans' via the duplicator are not possible on my crop sensor camera. So falls down on that one. The crop factor magnification though, is just about right to get a 110 neg full in frame, though, so a win on that one; not that I have many 110 negs and even fewer are going to be so great that double the pixel count will make much difference!

But, process of getting image from neg to view-able jpeg is a bit more involved and time consuming. The budget scanner is a lot more user-freindly and convenient.

A dilemah may be raised, though, if I was pondering an upgrade, and had £500 'spare'. Would it be worth spending that on a high end dedicated film scanner.... or perhaps a full-frame DSLR, and put the duplicator on that?

On that notion, the duplicator does have merit; mine was essentially 'free'; It had paid for itself 20 years ago, when I had copied all my Dad's old slides to print film so my Mum & Dad could both have their own copies and stop arguing over them post divorce, (Mum bought me the lens - Dad paid for the film... I spent a holiday when I was at home from Uni copying them... all parties happy!) And it sat redundant in the loft, pretty much since; I was never likely to want to start duplicating halide pictures onto more halide film, so it was essentially scrap. Cost me less than a tenner to get appropriate T-Mount adapter to fit it to the Nikon, for this experiment.

If I didn't have one? Well, suggestion is that they some-times crop up on e-bay or in junk-shops, and as a bit of pretty specialist and very redundant equipment, rarely fetch more than a few quid.

The Jessops Duplicator was definetley a generic design, that can be re-mounted via T-mount adaptor; but it's suggested that the Jessops branded one was only a rebranded generic make, so almost any of the type are likely to be the same, if you come accross one, and likely to be easily re-mounted if not already compatible with your camera.

Less than £25, then, could get you something that can use to transfer sub 35mm halide to digital; But not full frame, unless you have a full frame Digital SLR.

But if you do.... potentially could give results as good or better than any of the Sub £100 budget film scanners.

And possibly good enough to rival £500 bracket dedicated film scanners, if you'd go that far. (from couple of web-articles I read up researching the experiment)... In which case £25 for a duplicator and £500 for a DSLR could do the same job.... and give you a full-frame DSLR with multi-fariouse other uses besides.

So... not sure it was a completely useless excersize; idea has shown some merit, and.... pending comments, some of the niggles and short comings could be addressed with further advice or suggestion for further experimentation.

 

[joxby]

Hell Mike, even on a forum its a 2 way conversation.
If you were sat opposite me at a pub table, I'd a battered you with a bar stool long before half of this post had left your lips...

Anyway, slide copying is ok, I've done it myself with a macro lens and d200, its better than nothing, better than a cheapo Maplins scanner and comes close to low end flatbeds, but.....it has a monumental faff factor.
A slide duplicator is limited by the quality of the glass in it, a macro lens is as good as you can ever get it + extreme faff.

 

[excalibur2]

You might be on to something Mike as on another forum they mentioned you can pick up a full frame Canon 5d cheap now.

 

[Steve Smith]

I have been trying to do this using various lenses to 'scan' medium format and 5x4 negatives. I have given up now and bought an Epson 4870 scanner for the purpose but I think with a bit of care, good results can be had.

I did read somewhere about taking the slide copying lens apart and moving a few bits to make it cover the whole of a 35mm frame with a crop sensor camera. If I can find it again, I will post a link.

I have a D3200 and I might try that with mine now for 35mm as I think it has potential to be better than a flatbed scanner for 35mm.

Interesting article here (in two parts):
http://theonlinephotographer.typepa...ographer/2012/01/scan-film-with-camera-1.html
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/01/how-to-scan-film-2.html


Steve.

 

[Teflon-Mike]

Ta Steve, I didn't turn that up when I did my research before trying.

Any one have any thought on why my initial results might have been so disappointing, particularly the 'stitch'?

Other experiment I have an idea for is to try the other old method of duplicating, with an enlarger.... that came out the loft at the same time. First idea was to put flat-bed film scanner under it...... didn't work. Second Idea was to put flat bed scanner with the neon light removed under it.... but I need to fix a broken scanner to so break before I try that one!

But; some-where in my Dark-Room hand-book, is instructions for putting 35mm film camera, on it's back, under the enlarger & focusing on the shutter screen, but articles I have read so far, suggest that using an enlarger to 'reduce' less than 1:1 is a) tricky, and b) outside many enlarger lenses comfort zone.... so back to sectioning & stitching.

There is another I recall as well; 'Back-Screen Projection' Using enlarger or projector to enlarge image onto a screen, than using camera on tripod, behind the screen, to photograph the projected image, though not sure how I could set that up, or what problems there may be around screen-texture. Ground glass screen? Opaque white perspex perhaps? One for another time, maybe never.

So many ways to skin a cat, eh?

But, It's the post-processing here that's most defeating, particularly the section stitching. If THAT had been more successful, then the potential would have been there for some superb resolution scans, from the duplicator, even more potentially from the enlarger. But I am vexed by this pixel 'clumping'.

 

[Nod]

I'm guessing that the stitching problems are down to the software settings somewhere. In the past, I've copied slides and negs (for digitisation) using a lightbox and a macro lens (+ tripod) but now use a flatbed on the rare occasions I need to do this.

 

[Teflon-Mike]

I'm guessing that the stitching problems are down to the software settings somewhere.

Yes, I think stitching prob may be solved if I mess more in Photo-Shop.
I've done a couple more since & not got the pixel blocking; but only stichting four quarters, and original images done not really giving a fair test.

In the past, I've copied slides and negs (for digitisation) using a lightbox and a macro lens (+ tripod) but now use a flatbed on the rare occasions I need to do this.

Yup... these are pics I have been working on.....Remember, I bought the Duplicator in the early 90's, and working it out, I think it must have been about 1991/92ish when I was at Uni, and I only got my first SLR, Christmas 1989! I was a bit 'green' and my slide dupes... looking through them bigger than 5x7, many are a little orange and patchy! I knew NOTHING about 'white-balance', or light diffusion. I was working from the instructions that came with the lens and experimentation! I think I gave up trying to use my flash-gun, when the batteries died, and the window, as it was dark, and I think I sort of made my own light-box, from a broken table-lamp, a coffee tin and some tin-foil!
Anyway; after going through the boxes of slides I was given to do; I came accross a few rolls of 8mm Cine film.....

1/3 the width of a full-frame 35mm, about 1/12 the image area, this little sequence was at the full 2.5 zoom of the Duplicator lens.
Taken from scan of Copy-Print neg, here:-

I found I could just about get 1:1 'lifts' from teh cine film using a 3x Converter.
And YES that little smudge in the blue dungarees in the bottom right left hand corner IS me, aged about two and a half!

This was one of the 3x Converter + 2.5x Zoomm 'full-frame' cine-lifts to neg, scanned on the web-cam-scan, and I was rather dissapointed with it; so decided to see what I could do with the Slide-Duplicator, again.

Photo's to Digital in four quarter-frames this time, then stitched, the stitch merge has come out a lot cleaner; though whether this was because of the reduced merge-frames, or whether because I processed them differently, I'm not sure. First attempt in original post, I did photo-stith direct on jpg's from camera, then inverted & colour corrected the merged image. This time round I opened each camera file, inverted it, then saved as TIFF before merging, and doing final adjustments on full image.
Camera-Scan, I think HAS worked better; and I have certainly dragged more detail & better colour out of the neg... though, second generation copy, it's showing up the short-comings of the original image, and the copying, I think!

Is that REAL grain we are seeing there?! 1:1 of camera-scan stitch-file, and I think we ARE seeing the grain in the original 8mm Cine film!
So... process seems to be getting better, if the original material I'm working on isn't.

 

[Teflon-Mike]

Suggestion in article Steve linked, suggested that the dynamic range of slide-film was a bit much for a digi-sensor, and suggested trying HDR merging, to cover full range.... worth a try I suppose.....

Lift from Cine-Frame to print-neg, scanned in Web-Cam-Scan

Quarter Sections of Cine-Lift, Camera-Scanned; three exposures, 3-stops apart without shifting frame, HDR merged, then inverted, saved as Tiff, then Stitched.
Waste of bleedin time really..... Doh! any 'extended' dynamic range ion the original cine reversal film, WOULD of course have been utterly lost when I made the inter-neg!... unless I had bracketed them!
But, still tad better than web-cam-scan..
1:1 section from original Digi-Stitch.

Interesting to note that the HDR Merge has removed any original grain, seen in last attempt.