Hello all.

Feel free to ignore this, as I'm not sure I'm going to make use of the advice, but I quite possibly might. Also apologies for possible overlap with Frank's DIY drum scanner page, but my ideas are not as ambitious.

Standard wisdom, with some detractors is that using a DSLR to scan in negatives is not a great method. Given that, what would make it better?

I've been toying with some ideas:
1) Using an old Toyo or Omega monorail with one of the DSLR lensboard mounts on the back and I'm not sure what lens on the front. Then hacking another old standard to hold a piece of ANR glass, and attaching that onto an extension rail (I happen to have three...).
2) Wet mounting the negative on the ANR glass
3) Making a sort of light canon with 2 or 3 white paper diffusers so you could fire a flash in one end and have even light coming out the other end with no hotspots.
4) putting the whole assembly in some sort of dark box to eliminate room light.

This seems like it might step the process up a bit. One of the main complaints I hear about camera scanning is that you are at the mercy of dust and scratches, but if you wet mounted the film, I think you might do away with that. If you are scanning a larger negative, uneven light might be a problem, but if you diffused the light, I think you could make an even light source. Not sure if putting the whole rig in a box would be necessary but it might help.

Any thoughts? Waste of time? I'm not really thinking about stitching here, just getting one really good file that takes use of the DSLRs full megapixel file.

Thanks
Paul