Slide Copiers

[equinox]

Hi everyone

I'm a newbie here at TP but I've been pondering for a while how best to get my old slide collection onto the digital medium.

First thoughts were to get a dedicated film/slide scanner - was interested in the Plustek 7200i at circa £200 - apparently great 7200 dpi resolution for reasonable price. Don't want to spend too much more when the life will be expended when I have all slides copied. However, I saw some negative feedback on the Plustek scanner so held fire.

Opteka Slide Copier
The I went down the road of considering the simple slide copier - used to use one of these - a glorified open tube - Panagor, with my old film SLR - can't now of course with a Canon EOS 10d (sensor dust etc). Looked on Ebay and came up with a brand called Opteka - priced around £50 + postage to UK. This fits onto the filter thread on the lens front, so no dust implications etc. Has anyone used this and have good or bad feedback on quality?

They - Opteka - seem to rate themselves fairly highly for quality - they also stock incredibly high magnification long lenses (500-1000mm for modest prices - anyone tried those either??)

We'd be very interested in feedback on these items or other Slide Duplicators which would fit a Canon 24-105 77mm thread lens or even the basic 18-55mm 58mm thread lens. Incidentally, as the threads for these lens-front mounted duplicators seems to be 52mm (Opteka), would it be better to put this on the more basic 18-55 58mm thread lens , or try for a step down ring for the 24-105 (better quality) 77mm thread lens

Any answers much appreciated

Kind regards
Geoff
02380 251011

 

[CT]

Hi Geoff

Without being too unkind I think it has to be said that Opteka lenses are at the very cheap end of the market and you shouldn't expect too much from them at all.

As you know, the old 35mm slide copier was set up to reproduce the slide exactly on film with more or less precise framing. A possible problem I foresee is that there are several different digital sensor sizes which may present a problem with framing depending which sensor size you have, although I know nothing about these Opteka copiers at all, so I'm really just guessing.

My gut feeling, given that you want to limit what you spend is to bite the bullet and go for the Plustek scanner, as you'll get better images at that scanning resolution anyway.

 

[equinox]

Thanks CT

Yes - thats a valid point about framing and sensor sizes to consider and one which I think I considered a while back and have now overlooked - thanks for the reminder.