slides to digital

[OBELIX74]

I have over 2000 slides that I would like to transfer to my PC.
I haven't got a digital camera, although I am thinking of getting one.
All my present kit is Nikon (F90S), and was wondering if it is possible to use a OHNAR slide duplicator on a Nikon D body (70/80?).
Any tips, please?
Thanks,

 

[Alex_B]

I have no experience with slide duplicators which you attach to a digital camera, however, I tried a slide duplicator from film on film and was not happy with the outcome.

Is the OHNAR duplicator adjusted for digitial cameras with a crop factor? If not I could imagine that you slide would be cropped in the projection on the sensor. In any case you need a good light source to get the right colour ...

 

[Alex_B]

Anyway, whatever way you choose, scanning or duplicating by using a digital camera, it will take quite a lot of time to scan 2000 slides.

I did scan 6000ish slides with a Nikon 5000 ED scanner + slide feeder + a fast computer with lots of memory. Scanner and feeder I bought in an online shop and sold them 9 months later on Ebay for about 10% less than what I paid for them ... quite a good deal for me.

It requires a lot of postprocessing though (neatimage to reduce grain, and colour corrections and sharpening), and data files as 16-bit TIFFS easily exeed 120MByte per file. So you need a large harddrive + backup.

 

[brighteyesphotos]

If you don't want to do it yourself, you can take the slides to a photo lab and ask them to scan to disc. That way the pictures will be digital AND you have them on disc already. It can get pricey though. However, the quality may not be as high as what Alex mentioned. In the lab I work, I scan a lot of slides to CD.