On the first day of my archive expedition a week ago, I was faced with a quandary. Specifically: several folders full of slides showing images I Had To Have… but no way to capture them. The archive had not digitized the slides, and did not have a slide scanner, and I’d failed to bring one. In the end, the standard solution was found: I went out and bought a slide scanner. But while there in the archive, it was unclear if that option would be available to me. So… I MacGyvered a solution together there in the archive that allowed me to snag images. The results were kinda smallish, and it was labor intensive, but it more or less worked. Of course, the next day I had a slide scanner, and the MacGyver solution fell by the wayside.
This is the *third* slide scanner I’ve purchased. The first was a secondary feature of a regular flatbed scanner. It kinda worked… when it wanted to. It would sometimes simply get confused, and the only way to restart it was to reboot the computer. Feh. The second slide scanner would just plain lock up the computer, and the only way to get things running again was to hard-boot the computer. Bah! This string of FAIL turned me off the whole idea of scanning slides… which was unfortunate, since I have a boxload of old family slides that have been awaiting scanning.
The new scanner is a substantial improvement. Instead of plugging into the computer, it’s a stand-alone system that automatically records the images to an SD card. It has run like a champ.
But the image quality… meh.
So yesterday I went back to the MacGyver solution. Instead of cobbling something together in a matter of minutes with whatever I happened to have on hand, this time I was able to use better materials and tools, and the end result seems to me to be *far* better than the slide scanner. For example, here are two takes on the same slide. Both are reduced in size to 35% of the original image (2400X1600 pixels for the scanner, 4288X2848 pixels for the MacGyver Mk. II system):
UPDATE: another take on the MacGyver version, with some tinkering to deal with some focusing issues:
Not only is the Macgyver version about 79% bigger, it’s also brighter and with better color. The scanner version is also pretty badly mucked up with dust and fibers; these were no doubt introduced when the scanner was dumped into the luggage.
The MacGyver Mk. II was assembled using scraps and a few hours work. A Mk. III version, which I’m seriously contemplating, would be lighter, made from fiberglass, and would be made to accept microfiche, microfilm and regular film, something I struggled with earlier iterations of slide scanners with no success. I imagine that several versions of more or less the same thing are available for sale online… but screw that noise, I built my own.
If anyone’s interested in how to build your own, let me know.