How do you copy 127 film slides?

[Walti]

Father in law is having a massive tidy up and has found his boxes of slides, most of which are 127 film size, giving 40x40mm slides.

will a camera lens adaptor system work for these or are we better off getting them copied by a company?

35mm slides are easier as they’re a format available to modern cameras. - so for those should I use a 35mm sized sensor camera?

I suppose the Hassleblad digital will have a square sensor?

so should I rent a camera to copy them? Or use the Oly?

[MJ224]

Kinda depends on the required IQ is.

I have copied slides just by holding them up to a window and using my Olympus camera to copy them.

[BDennis]

I put slides onto a LED lightbox then photograph them with my m43 OMD camera and 60mm macro lens - Em1Mk3 last time. You can then just crop to the required format. The sensor format doesn't have to be the same as the film size doing that, you just lose some pixels in the crop. You could use a high Res mode if you want more pixels.

I put the camera on a tripod and used Olympus Capture with it plugged into the laptop over USB.

It can be tedious if you have 100s though!

Here's one from slide film

Hawaiian Sunset - Big Island Hawaii - Slide Film by Bill Dennis, on Flickr

[AMc]

Digitising slides or negatives is a labour intensive task.

You could user a flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter or a dedicated slide scanner - many people buy them, use them to do their collection then move them on on forums or eBay.
You get a lot of control but it takes hours and you need to be sure you're using the right settings etc. to begin with.

I've never used a camera to copy slides - I would expect any of the 16mp or 20mp Olympus cameras to do an acceptable job with the right lens and holder at a quality that will be a on a par with most slide film.

If you send them to a company, they will probably use better equipment than you will and do it faster. On the other hand they may be less diligent about the final result on any particular image - and the last time I looked it wasn't cheap.

[Walti]

Having read all the answers it seems there are varying methods. I’m not sure how many he wants copying, but the prices seem to stack up as follows:

lightbox, camera on a tripod with macro lens - £30
lens adaptor to speed things up slightly - £70
dedicated slide scanner - with auto dust and scratch removal - £300
sending them off for scanning - £1.50 each.

For a few hundred the slide scanner looks best as you can have two or three slide frames, to allow a two person production line to speed things up!

[MikeOxon]

If your slides are in standard mounts, they should fit in a 35 mm slide holder. I use a home made copier attached to my 60mm macro on my Olympus E-M1-ii. If you adjust the tube length to fill the frame vertically the 4:3 format makes a better match to your square slides than the 3:2 format of a 35 mm frame. With a 20MP sensor you should still get a 15MP image which should be enough to capture the detail of the slide.

[Walti]

Best quality Blue Peter kitchen roll tube?

How do you ensure consistent lighting with that?

[MikeOxon]

Mine was actually made from black plastic drainpipe, with an empty filter ring glued to the camera end and an old hand-held slide viewer, cut down to just the holder part, glued to the outer end. I expect kitchen-roll tube would do the job. I use natural daylight (skylight) as the light source or you could use flash.

It's very quick to work through a box of slides. I set the lens to MF and focus on the first slide, then use Aperture priority to keep a constant aperture of f/8. Also, turn 'off' the IS (stabilisation) because it cannot cope with the subject being attached to the camera and will wave about if the camera is moved. I use a remote release to avoid touching the camera. Before I made my own copier, I used a Canon 9900F flat bed scanner and found it tediously slow.