Digitizing slides with an EOS Rebel T6s

[kvbarkley]

(I want to talk about something besides 3rd party RF lenses)

I volunteered to digitize some old slides. No problem, I thought, since I have a slide scanner. It turns out these are (I think!) 127 film, 1-5/8 square, which while they fit in the scanner, the scanner only scans the 35mm area, so I lose 30 % or so of the slide.

One option is to use my T6S and 60mm macro lens and copy them that way (Though that is not ideal since I will be transferring a square slide to a 3:2 format, so I will only get 2666 pixels on a side with a lot of wasted space.)

As a test, I am going to put some wax paper on the window, and shoot some test shots.

Any thoughts as to good settings to use?

(If the test shots come out OK, I will get a light box and macro rail)

[Tronhard]

(I want to talk about something besides 3rd party RF lenses)  Totally agree - THANK YOU!

That's a bit of a challenge, given that you will always be tied to the native 3x2 format in your camera.  I sent some slides that I had to a bureau in the US and they scanned them for me, and they did a good job at reasonable prices.  I think they have the ability to deal with square format using their specialist gear, FWIW.

[jrhoffman75]

I think you could compose the image and let camera determine the exposure. depth of field and motion won’t be issues, so you don’t need to be preselecting a particular setting. Add exposure comp if necessary to account for any influence of the aspect ratio difference. 

[jrhoffman75]

What brand slide scanner?

[kvbarkley]

Minolta Dual Scan IV. I use VueScan with it, since the manual lists a Pentium 166 MHz / Power PC G3 for the software specs. Though actually, I think the mirror is getting pretty dirty and the lamp pretty dim since it seems to spot a lot.

[Waddizzle]

Do you have the software to stitch together images in a panoramic shot?

In my experience, any flat bed scanner easily outperforms any consumer camera on the market.  The number of DPI from a scanner way outperforms a DSLR.  The only way [a] DSLR can come close is to use a macro lens to sample portions of the subject just like you would create a single landscape panoramic image.  

You may have to capture multiple rows of images with a 5x macro lens to even come close to your average flat bed scanner.  But it sounds like you’re sampling small negatives, which only makes the high resolution issues more [acute] when trying to capture the entire sample in a single shot.

[ Think “life size” on the image sensor. ]

Back to the top, if you have software that can stitch together multiple images from your scanner into a composite whole, then that may be your best option with your current gear.

[kvbarkley]

I have Photomerge in Photoshop elements. I have heard conflicting things about the scanner vs the DSLR, which is why I want to try it. If I zoom in to life size (1:1)* I should be getting close to the scanner resolution so I can see if a scanner buys me much.

*(6000 pixels for .878 inches (22.3 mm) or 5260 dpi.)