Digital Photography Hacks

Copy Slides with Your Digicam

Dedicated slide scanners can be expensive and more than a little tedious to use. The digicam you already own might be your best bet for digitizing some of your favorite slides.

I have a lifetime of slides neatly tucked away in my closet, and I know it would take two lifetimes to properly clean, preview, scan, correct, and archive my legacy image collection. But wait! What about using a digicam to copy all those images?

Previously, the preferred method was to enslave yourself to an ergonomic chair in front of a dedicated slide copier that was connected to your computer. Nikon, Minolta, Microtek, and Polaroid all have competent units.

Inexpensive flatbeds with transparency units in the lid don’t do nearly as good a job as the dedicated slide copiers. Agfa, Epson, and Microtek make more expensive flatbeds that do better. The inexpensive units are not only cumbersome and time-consuming. They also don’t have the resolution for small formats, such as 35mm, nor do they capture the density range that can hide in a slide. You’re really better off renting time on a dedicated slide scanner.

This brings us back to using a digicam for this project. Before getting too excited, let’s examine some of the potential drawbacks:

Compressed density range

Most digicams (prosumer digital SLRs are the exception) capture 8-bit channels (the amount of image information recorded by the device). Even inexpensive scanners usually do better, and the best scanners capture 16 bits per ...