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Occasionally there will pop up a thread about someone having/obtaining piles of slides. There follows a discussion about digitising them with a scanner so that they can be viewed without a slide projector.
It occurs to me that it should be possible.hook.up a digital scanner, via HDMI, to a TV or monitor, but I can't find such a thing.
I guess the "scanner" could be as simple as a decent resolution mobile phone, mounted in some sort of box with a backlight for the slide. (I once had a lens attachment for a SLR that worked like this). A clever app could change negatives to positive images too.
Has anyone seen, or even used, anything like this?
I'm a bit puzzled as to why you want the direct link between the scanner and the TV, why not just scan and save the images to use any way you like? The point of the scanner is to turn the physical slide into a digital file - the ones I've had scan the slide in one pass, you wouldn't have a live feed from the scanner to the TV - the scanner needs a computer and some software interpreting the scan to create a graphic file.
So I bought an LED lightbox from Amazon.
I stuck the slide on it and set up my camera (canon R6) on a tripod with my macro lens (ef 100mm2.8) at f8.
I then imported to Lightroom and cropped / straightened then.
I've since shared a one drive folder around the family.
This led panel
I suppose you could digitise them just taking a photo with a smartphone over the light box then crop and adjust.
@scotroutes - I have a pair of projectors, one for display on wall, one with built in screen. They were £1300(!) back in the 1990's when my dad bought them. Doing nothing in the shed and I can deliver them on 12th as I go through your neck of the woods to holiday...
@matt_outandabout thanks for the offer. I do have a projector (and screen, somewhere) but it's just less convenient than grabbing a random box of slides and connecting something to the telly.
A bit of digging has turned up some slide digitisers with HDMI out. They're not ridiculously expensive so I might give one a go and report back.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why you want the direct link between the scanner and the TV, why not just scan and save the images to use any way you like?
Or just use a projector if you don't want to actually digitize, it'd be cheaper because it doesn't have all the fancy electronics.
The problem with any phone camera based setup is most of them are very wide angle lenses, where what you need is a relatively long lens to flatten the image. You need to minimize distortion and the need for cropping because the more processing that is required the more it fidelity is lost.
Slides are relatively straightforward.
Negatives however are not. They don't generally have a good picture if you just acan them and invert the colour.
The backing colour needs filtered out. The highlights are likely over exposed* and generally its all a bit lacking in contrast.
They need tweaked, either manually in a darkroom or digitally in lightroom etc to get a worthwhile photo.
*A good negative has been exposed for the shadows and the overexposed highlight will have the information you need to get it the printing or scanning process.
Just send them away and get them scanned cheaply then decide of that enough and pay for the nice ones to be done nicely.
Or be brutal about the ones you keep using your current projector.
it's just less convenient than grabbing a random box of slides and connecting something to the telly.
A bit of digging has turned up some slide digitisers with HDMI out. They're not ridiculously expensive so I might give one a go and report back.
Surely that's less convenient than grabbing a random box of slides, scanning them all in to say a laptop, and then connecting the laptop to the telly. The difference being, you're scanning them once rather than every time you want to view them.
If the excitement of a "random box" is something you seek, save them to folders named "Box01, Box02..."
One way I can think of, to display images on a TV without actually digitising them, is to use a camera with a direct HDMI output, a macro lens and a slide copying attachment. I have Nikon cameras that have such an output, I'm sure some other brands do too. My kit is higher end stuff, so probably a very expensive route, not sure which cheaper cameras have a HDMI output. But I know I can plug any of my cameras into a TV with the appropriate HDMI lead (some use smaller HDMI connectors at the camera end). The upside of this method is you will get fantastic quality images on the screen; if you have a 4k TV, you will get very high resolution. The downside is of course it won't work for negatives, and you have to change each slide manually.
Scanning images can be very expensive; dedicated scanners are a few hundred quid at least I think (I haven't looked in a while). They will come with software to remove dust and scratches etc, and to invert negative images to positives. For ultimate quality, images scanned in at very high res can then be manipulated at will, for colour, tone, contrast, composition, etc. I think there was a relatively cheap device that didn't create a file, but produced a 'live' scan image that could be output to a TV etc. I can't remember what it was or if it's even still available. The other issue is of course that scanning takes AGES; for max high res scans, each frame may take several minutes, not including any corrections in post. File sizes can be very large, many tens or even hundreds of megabytes. Drives fill up quickly. Part of what I do is archiving film images, and it gets very, very, very boring indeed if you have hundreds or even thousands to do. Scanning is not as straightforward as it may seem. For archival purposes, you'll be wanting to output to a RAW (or .dng) file, or at least TIFF, as JPEGs involve digital compression and you'll lose image information and some post production potential. A RAW/DNG or TIFF file allows far greater depth of manipulation for eg shadow areas, highlights, colour balance etc.
There are commercial scanning services, but you'll have to shop around as many are very expensive to do bulk amounts. Not all are great either; I've heard mixed reactions to such services.
There's no reason why you can't use a 'phone in some sort of basic rig, as long as your 'phone will allow close up photography. Image quality won't be the best, but it will be a cheap way of digitising things. If your 'phone allows 'mirroring' on another device's screen, such as Airplay, then you can do it without any further kit.
Good luck, and let us know how you get on with it.