DSLR Scanner: Lenses

[Old-N-Feeble]

Peter... That's what I did but the seller has that disabled. I received an auto-reply stating "...unfortunately the seller cannot reply..." blah blah blah.

[Peter J. De Smidt]

If you go to the <About the Seller> link, it'll take you to a page that lists their email address along with a live chat option.

[Old-N-Feeble]

Thanks, Peter. I sent them an email.

[Peter J. De Smidt]

Make sure you read the macro forum posts about the lens. At that magnification, it's very specialized. Without the ability to do focus stacking with less than 10 micron steps, you won't get very good images. With a dlsr scanner, it would mostly be useful for film/developer tests, where the idea would be to capture one tile of the film, as opposed to covering the whole negative, which would require a huge number of tiles. That said, how an image looks when printed at it's final size is much more important than how the film looks under a microscope.

[Old-N-Feeble]

Peter... Since it's optimized for 20x I was hoping it would perform well at 4x or so but that may not be.

[Peter J. De Smidt]

Peter... Since it's optimized for 20x I was hoping it would perform well at 4x or so but that may not be.

I doubt that it would be any good at all at 4x. If that's the goal, there are some better options. I posted some examples from an inexpensive 4x objective and some info in posts 3 and 5 of this thread.

None the less, for general scanning use, something like a standard 60mm macro, especially one that goes to 1:1 with autofocus, would be by far the easiest to use. Ideally, you'll be able to focus from a tethered computer. If you go much above 1:1 magnification, you'll need to use focus stacking for good results, and that greatly increases the complexity and cost of the project. For large format work, it would also be overkill.

[Old-N-Feeble]

Thank you, Peter. I need to take more notes so I can keep up.

[Old-N-Feeble]

I saw the following lens on the 'bay but didn't bid on it because I had other plans for my money and I don't know anything about it. My guess is one like it could be very promising.

The title begins with "Kodak Printing Ektar 103mm" and it's a recently completed auction.

[SURF]

I have tried to make a picture of the USAF resolution target with a Canon D450 (12 Mp), extention rings and some lens. It worked. The size on the target was about 24 mm x 16 mm. Was possible to get at least 3600 dpi (see the 400% crop). Really not bad.

[Peter J. De Smidt]

Hi Surf, Thanks for the test.