Digitizing my diapositive slides with my A7

[GeoMac]

For a couple of years I have been thinking of digitizing my diapositives. I have several thousand slides from the 80ies and 90ties pluss older family slides from 50 years back. Having it done professoinal is really expensive so I tried with different methods. a couple of flatbedscanners was tested, but it took a long time, created large files of not optimal quality. I found that it also focus just at the glass scanner surface so any dust there were very sharp, whereas the dias not always was.. so i bought a simple Soligor diasduplicator t42 to minolta and hooked it to my Sony A7 with a minolta to sony E adapter. It kind of worked but it was cumbersome and time-consuming to change slides and check focus for each slide. It also has a single glass lens of unknown quality and no aperture obviously. I didnt bother with this either. The final solution was to use a macro lens with 1:1 magnification, so I got a used Tamron 90mm f2,8 AF for Sony and used it with my LA-EA4 adapter. I made a very simple lightbox from a 4€ Perspex plexiglass (white acryl) and a 30 $ battery powered videolight with 160 led lights. Put the lightsource in a box with the perspex as a lid and used a macro tripod to get the 90mm in correct position above it. I taped a corner of perspex bits onto the lightbox so that the slides could be placed easily in right position. It takes only a few second to place the slide, a two second wait for the self timer and then the exposure, so many slides could be done quickly. I then used the play memories app Remote controll on my iPad to check exposure, focus and placement of the slide. This worked very well. I chose raw plus jpeg in the app and then i got instantly jpeg saved on my ipad and at the same time raw and jpeg on the camera card. it was very easy to digitize slides this way, i could make 100 slides in about 10 minutes! The camera was autofocusing or i could use manual with focus peaking. Adjusting exposure and white balance was very convenient from the ipad. Quality was at least as good as my scan- test and acceptable for me. nice to see the old pictures that was hidden away for so many years!

Hope this can inspire others to use their fantastic A series digitizing machines to recover old treasures from cellars and cupboards where they hide.

[silverblue]

Great idea. Thanks for showing your setup. I even have most of the gear - including a Nikkor 55mm macro lens with e-mount adapter, and the same LED light!

[Steve C]

Great effort. I too come from the chrome era with many slides. Thanks for posting.

[Thomas Hofinger]

This is indeed a very good solution! I did it in a similar way, using my A7r and a 100mm Contax-Zeiss Macro lens - but i did not have the idea of using the Play Memories app on the iPad!

Have a look at some pictures of my solution, sorry for the text being in german: http://thomashofinger.at/2015/04/25/filme-digitalisieren-ist-nicht-schwer/

[cadibob]

Hi

Here is my solution :

Sony A7II, Zuiko 50mm f1.8, filters frames and/or step-up filter frames, a high power led light mounted into a wooden box, with an on/off button.

It remains the most hassle part of the job (Photoshop) : framing at the right size, removing dust particles, giving the true colors, ...

 

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[GeoMac]

Heres where some of the scanned slides ended up! I used a Dremel to drill holes in the corners of the slides and thread a thin white nylon thread through the slides and fastened the thread at the top and base of the lamp-shade.

[PMiheller]

Hi,

 

has anybody something similar for negative film? How to "exchange" the colours - all the rest is available for me too... ( MAF 100/2.8 rulez! )

Thx,

Peter

[addicted2light]

Hi,

 

has anybody something similar for negative film? How to "exchange" the colours - all the rest is available for me too... ( MAF 100/2.8 rulez! )

Thx,

Peter

 

 

Hi, I've wrote about this a few years ago.

 

Scanning film in hi-resolution (compared to using a flatbed like the Epson 700V):

Best film scanner: Canon 5D Mark II vs Drum scanner vs Epson V700

How to scan films using a digital camera

 

 

Getting the right colors from negative film

How to get the right colors from negative films

 

Hope this helps.