My old 450D. At least the whole setup up doesn’t hog my usual camera, and its 12Mpix seems to be plenty given the quality of the slides.
The heart of the setup, a Kaiser Dia Duplikator. Comes with an integrated (but removable) close-up lens which I don’t trust much (single element) so I decided to got without it.
Canon EF-S 60mm Macro. My first iteration used the Canon EF 50mm/1.8 with a macro ring but this lens has a big drawback: the front moves when focusing, so the slide holder moves with it, and the AF motor has to pull all that weight, and een if you use manual focus, you are putting some weight on a moving part. So I found a second hand 60mm macro with an internal focusing (€220). A minor problem with the internal focusing is that it zooms slightly while focusing but since the focus is normally always at the same distance the framing ends up being the same in all shots.
The problem with the 60mm lens is that it is a bit longer than the 50mm the duplicator was designed for, so the tube should be lengthened. Which is done here with a series of step-up/step-down filter rings, that allowed me to get the length about right.
The duplicator is illuminated with an Aputure MC light source that I use for many things. The announced CRI 96 isn’t too bad, and I can set the color temperature. In practice though I have set it to 4500K and use the camera with auto-white balance, given the color shift of the slides I’m not aiming for accuracy, just that things look OK.
A bunch of Arca-Swiss plates & quick-release I have at hand, plus various screws and adapters from a kit I found on Amazon. A pair of zip ties keeps everything aligned. A side benefit is that I can put the whole thing on a tripod and it doesn’t take up table space.
USB cable to a Linux PC with Entangle and Digikam. The live histogram in Entangle is fairly useful to check out exposure. If I want autofocus, I need to get out of Entangle live-preview before I take the shot, but it’s a relatively minor inconvenience (still a lot more practical than doing manual focus on each, which is necessary because the thin cardboard slide mounts don’t always put the film at the same distance).
On the software side, I wrote two scripts:
One that defines two KDE “actions” that I can call from Dolphin’s right click menu to right images by just tweaking the EXIF orientation flag (no re-encoding is done).
One that creates a number-holder slide in Entangle’s capture directory from the highest-numbered slide of the collection (otherwise Entangle restarts from 0).
This whole enterprise turns out to be a rabbit hole because I also had to clean & repair the slide projector, replace the plastic sleeves that had become sticky, etc… It is also fun to see the evolution of my father’s photographic technique!
For me, only a couple. I found negative scanning one of the most mind-numbing activity imaginable. Fumbling the film into a fiddly film holder (I tried several), positioning every frame carefully on the light table, calibrating the camera placement so it’s perfectly orthogonal, cropping and rotating each and every shot, it’s all just pure tedium, and it sapped the joy right out of my analog photography.
The Easy35 simplifies this tremendously. The camera is always at the perfect position, the light is always perfectly even, the film is easy to feed and quick to advance. Crop remains consistent over the entire scanning session.
But you’re right, the Easy35 is expensive. Film is expensive, too. A roll of Portra goes for€20 these days, plus €5-€15 for development. It’s crazy. It’s an expensive, antiquated hobby. Still, I tend to value my time even higher than that. Perhaps I’d see it differently in a few years. Right now I have small kids at home and a busy job. My spare time is valuable at the moment.
To an extent, I’d say that the tedium is actually part of the point of analog photography. The extra effort required for every frame is what makes each frame more precious. It makes your shooting more deliberate and slows you down. Those can be good things. But I found no creative value in the scanning process.
I’ve been mostly happy with JJC’s knockoff of the Nikon ES-2. It doesn’t solve the “fiddly film holder” complaint, but solves most of the rest. I tried the copy stand approach and it was just too fiddly in comparison.
In my case, the lab(s) cut all negatives at a maximum of 4 frames per strip, so auto-advancing systems don’t work well. I’m digitizing old negatives from high school and college, not newly shot film though. I’ve gotten through half or more than half of my own negatives in only a week or so. Of course I think the parents have a lot more I might need to digitize over Christmas break.
About 25 years too late here. Especially since at that point I had no idea that I’d be wanting to digitize the negatives as digital cameras were in their infancy.
I can’t see myself going back to film. Currently - I see no benefit of doing that. When it comes to intention in shooting - I agree - the digital tends to make us click the shutter faster. However- I am trying to be more intentional with the digital because the price comes back to hit me in terms of storage and time to settle on what is good.
My main purpose of converting film to digital would be for archiving old negatives - I have a few.
Your points are quite valid - I appreciate the honest view. I am still postponing such a purchase (scanning device) as I don’t even have a macro lens. I did try a standard one but there is a lot of wasted space so the work is still in the distant future.
