This is something I had in my mind for a very long time.
While my Epson scanner does a very good job at scanning negatives, I find it slow. Thing is, scanning at such high resolutions to get the most out of such a tiny piece of film is bound to be on the long side... But what if I could speed this up to, lets say, 10 seconds? Well, this was just the plan. The project had to give me the possibility to scan 4x5, 6x6 and 35mm, be extremely simple, give high resolution and natural colors. Well, this gave me most of those.
The original goal was to see if I could make a Fuji Frontier like high speed scanner from what I had lying around the house.
So, an old ceiling light, the can from an old computer power supply, an acrylic mirror that goes into lockers, a white plastic diffuser, wood, magnets, film holders for my big enlarger and the all important capture device, my little Canon Powershot.
The box works a bit like a slide duplicator, except the camera height isn't adjustable and the small positioning cradle I made will only fit the Powershot. The main reason why I opted for a point&shoot is that their macro capability is simply outstanding.
Now, you may wonder how I get to make an image without the ever so present orange mask of the color film? Well, the trick relies in using a long forgotten feature of all cameras: manual white balance.
The trick is to take the white balance on a clear piece of film. This will cancel out the orange mask. Then, all there is left to do is to take the image and invert it in Photoshop. For this experiment, I didn't play with the colors at all. All I did with the sample was invert the image...
While the results are not exactly what I expected, I must say I'm pretty surprised at how good the results are.
Here are a few pictures of the contraption
