Kodachrome Slides to digital

AggieMike88

AggieMike88

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The original "I don't know it all" of aviation.
Has anyone embarked on a project to take slides from the 1950's to 70's and "up convert" them to digital formats?

My father has boxes and boxes of Kodachrome from his days of yore and my youth.

My brother and I would like to get them into today's "modern" formats.

We talked to CVS and Walgreens who offer the service. But due to the large quantity, the estimate is getting close to 1 AMU.

I am thinking we purchase a purpose built scanner and let Dad do that as a project. Plus he could type in some details about the image as he goes.

Any suggestions on getting this done?
 
I bought a good scanner and did it myself. The results were excellent but it was extremely time consuming. Probably worth the expense honestly.
 
I faced that situation about ten years ago. I bought a (used) Nikon scanner that was intended for slides and did it all myself. Kind of a tedious chore - but the
reward was revisiting all the experiences that led to taking the photos in the first place. In other words, well worth it.

One thing I found was that some of my slides were badly faded. At one point in the past I bought some professional (movie) film leftovers that had been put on 35 MM rolls by the outfit
peddling the product. They processed it as well - and the results were fine when fresh. However, as I found out, they did not age well. OTOH the genuine Kodak slides (the vast majority)
have held up very well. Good luck.

Dave
 
If you have a good interchangeable lens camera and a macro lens, you can create a makeshift light table and do it that way. That's how I digitized my dad's slides. Worked great.
 
My dad also did the scanner thing. Took all his 70s and 80s slides and digitized them.
 
AggieMike88 said:
Has anyone embarked on a project to take slides from the 1950's to 70's and "up convert" them to digital formats?

My father has boxes and boxes of Kodachrome from his days of yore and my youth.

My brother and I would like to get them into today's "modern" formats.

We talked to CVS and Walgreens who offer the service. But due to the large quantity, the estimate is getting close to 1 AMU.

I am thinking we purchase a purpose built scanner and let Dad do that as a project. Plus he could type in some details about the image as he goes.

Any suggestions on getting this done?
Click to expand...

I used a good scanner with the slide jig to do the scanning of some my parent's slides. Kind of tedious.

There's a local guy that does film processing and a variety of conversion services (e.g., VHS to DVD and such). You might be able to find a local guy that might do it for less than CVS/Walgreens.
 
cessna182b said:
OTOH the genuine Kodak slides (the vast majority) have held up very well
Click to expand...
I believe just about all of them are Kodachrome.... which I recall from my photographer interest in the mid 80's was some of the most stable film of the period.
 
Yeah, Kodachrome was amazing film. Sad to see that go. I bought a film scanner from B&H, a Minolta I believe, and did them myself. In theory, most flatbed scanners will do it. In reality, the dedicated film scanner worked much better. If my memory is right, Kodachrome dynamic range is almost as good as B&W film, so doing it yourself may lead to way better results than hiring it out.
 
I did it. Took several hundred slides form the 50s to 1973 to a specialty place. Cheap at twice the price.
 
Jeff Oslick said:
I've been researching this a lot myself, as I have about 1,000 slides from my dad and myself that need to be scanned. I've pretty much decided on this unit, but waiting to pull the trigger until I know I'll have some time to at least start the process.

https://www.amazon.com/Plustek-OpticFilm-8300i-Film-Scanner/dp/B09L7NDNFG?ref_=ast_sto_dp
Click to expand...
That’s a newer version of the one I used. It’s painstaking but works well. I cleaned each slide, and did a footlocker full of them. It took days and days and days.
 
That's one nice thing about the camera+macro lens solution - each slide takes like two seconds instead of one or two minutes like the scanners. But the setup was more difficult.
 
I looked at tons of solutions and found that the Nikon ES-2 is the most convenient thing I've found. The thing is just a holder that screws to the front of an appropriate macro lens. There are three Nikon "micro" lenses that will work with it (it needs like 6-8" minimum focus). The problem is that Canon doesn't make a compatible lens, but their new RF 100 L macro is pretty close (it loses a tiny bit on the edges). I might try building a spacer to get it the right distance.

Before I had that, I had another hack. Take the lens out of the slide projector and point your camera down the throat where the lens was, focus and snap the picture.
 
I can sketch up a diagram of what I did, but instead of using a holder, I just used a tripod so that everything was always in the same place.

I used a tray that was big enough to hold a little battery -powered light, and on top of the tray I placed a piece of glass with semi-opaque vellum. You can likely use wax paper or similar as long as there is no texture to it that may show up in the image. Anything with a 90 degree corner can be used as a holder so that the slides can simply be placed there. Like a piece of cardboard even. Then point the camera downwards at the appropriate place and tighten the tripod down. That gives you a lot of latitude regardless of the minimum focus distance of your macro lens. Just as long as you can fill the frame with the slide or else you won't get the benefit of your full sensor resolution. It was very jerry-riggy but cost me nothing as I had a camera and lens already.

For reassurance I just stopped down to like f11 and checked the focus occasionally to make sure I didn't bump anything out of focus. Turn the lights off in the room to avoid glare, on the slide, set the camera to your lowest ISO for best quality, keep a small aperture as I mentioned, and just set the shutter speed as appropriate. Or set the camera to aperture priority mode so that it does shutter speed for you. Just make sure your not on auto-ISO or else the quality of the resulting images will suffer.

Edit - @flyingron's hack above using the projector itself seems like it does a bit of the same thing without the makeshift light box setup. I didn't think of that.
 
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