Scanning negs and slides without adapters?

[ben_roubin]

Is there a way to scan negatives and transparacies on a flatbed

without the adapters?

[frank_skomial]

Most likely answer is NO, but that depends on the type of scanner, if it has additional light source in the scanner cover or not.

 

For a flatbed scanner, the light must go through the slides or negatives and into the scanning light sensitive element.

That is flatbed scanners that have source of light built into the scanner top cover, are appropriate and they come with a slide or negative adapter.

 

Ordinary scanners do not have source of light in the top cover of the scanner, cannot be used.

 

Trying to scan negative or slide in ordinary scanner, would cause light reflection off the slide surface and not reflection of the scanner cover that would possibly make some sense. That is the light must go through slide or negative and not get reflected from.

 

I do not know how to explain this, but most scanners that just do reflective scanning, the cover is just flat white plastic panel, so cannot be used.

 

Some flatbed scanners have a drawer for slides and negatives below normal scanning glass, and that drwader places slides between the light souce below, and the scanning optical element above the drawer, so the light goes through the slide and not get reflected from. Their design already allows slide scanning.

 

Theoretically you could use an additional strong light above the slide laying on the regular scanner glass, and not use regular scanner cover, but I would not recommend such nodifications, since perhaps you could not turn off the original light of the scanner below the glass.

[brian_ellis16]

If by "adapter" you mean the film holder, yes it's very doable with at least the Epson 4990 (and I would assume with any of its predecessors), which I use to scan 8x10 negatives without a holder (Epson doesn't supply one in that size)for the 4990. I've had no problems placing the negative directly on the glass. It's been a while and I forget whether the emulsion side needs to be up or down to avoid Newton rings.

[frank_skomial]

You can scan with Epson 4990 since it has the:

 

"The 4990's film adaptor (TPU) is much more than most scanners' simple light box; the 4990 has a lamp above that scans along with the sensors below."

 

- so the light gets through your negatives or slides. Make sure you have scanner like that.

[patrick_viebey___orlando__]

Ummm. I think there's a point missing here. In order to scan negatives or transparencies on a flatbed, you need some kind of light source to illuminate them correctly. That's what the adapters do - provide a color corrected light source behind the film for the scanner. And then, or course, the scanner software has to 'know' it's a postive or negative in order to process it correctly.

 

So, yes, you could I suppose bodge some kind of light source behind them, but then you'd likely need to color correct it. Also, of course, the source has to be cool enough not to damage the film but bright enough to give the right contrast.

 

Finally, you need to scan a very small image at a very high resolution in order to end up with an image 'scaled' enough to print at whatever size/resolution you want. That means a lot of computer memory as well as either a firewire or SCSI scanner (or a lonnnng scan time).

 

Could be wrong - not a scanner expert. But, that's what my Epson 2450 scanner does. And, I bumped into the memory issue myself.

 

Hope this helps.

[ben_roubin]

It doesn't look like there is a light source in the lid of my scanner, but I know there were film and slide adapters for it. I doubt I'll ever find those.

So there has to be a second light source above the transparency as well as below? The white lid doesn't reflect the light back through the slide?

[patrick_viebey___orlando__]

Not near bright enough. Nope.

 

Sorry 'bout that. Also, how fast is your scanner? How long would it take to scan a 35mm at enough resolution to make your prints (and can it even get there?)