Scanning 9 x 12 on the cheap - ideas?

[Julio1fer]

I have access to a set of about a thousand 9 x 12 film and plate negatives from about a century ago. They belonged to a friend of my father's who died 38 years ago. He was a keen art and humanities amateur, musician and painter - I got to know him as a boy. A week ago I was able to browse part of the collection, which is stored in a couple of cartons. I am sure that there is material of historical interest there and want to do something to rescue it.

I would like to somehow digitalize the images, not necessarily with high quality, but good enough to organize the collection and to select those with special interest.  Problem: I have no access to scanners that can work with that size. My own flatbed will work with 6x9, but scanning and joining one thousand images takes more time than what I have for this project.

I was thinking of making a mask for my makeshift light table, setting a digicam on a tripod, photographing the negatives and then inverting. This should at least be quick and cheap enough.

Has anybody tried this? Should I consider another workflow?

The only alternative I could think of is contact printing, but it seems  too expensive and time consuming for a first screening.

All ideas and comments very welcome.

[sandeha]

If you can set up a solid tripod and your lightbox is close to 'daylight', then using a digicam should be quite efficient.  The downside (of not having a better scanner, I guess) is that you might have to spend more time on adjusting the levels after you've done the shots.

Otherwise, with a good mask, stitching might be faster than you think.  Best thing is always try.  It certainly sounds intriguing.

[ImageMaker]

If the digicam has enough megapixels, and focuses accurately, it might well produce quite adequate web-size images (or a little bigger than web size), though it won't begin to compete with the 88 megapixels I get from 9x12 cm with my 2400 ppi flatbed and glassless negative carriers.  OTOH, your digicam also won't take up your whole hard disk with the images -- 1000 scans at 88 megapixels would be a little over 90 gigabytes counting waste space...

[Julio1fer]

I am aiming at producing images of, say, 600 x 900 pixels, low compression, for evaluation on a PC display and maybe to organize later in a Web site or CD. Images would be 8-bit grayscale. Therefore, Web quality is OK.

Need a cycle time of well below a minute per image in this initial register. I think I can achieve that with a tripod or support for the digicam and a mask over the light table, and reasonable workflow organization.

The big question is, will I achieve reasonable tonality etc without major postprocessing... This I have to answer by experiment, no other way unless someone already has done something similar.

Thanks for the comments; will post results here when I have something.

[Conrad Hoffman]

I sometimes copy book pages with my digicam, and my dad has duplicated hundreds of 35mm slides with good results. IMO, it's way faster than mucking about with a scanner, and the quality is plenty good enough for web or casual display use. OTOH, if you have some real treasures there, you might select a few and spend the time or money to do really good scans and make prints.

[ImageMaker]

The big question is, will I achieve reasonable tonality etc without major postprocessing... This I have to answer by experiment, no other way unless someone already has done something similar.

I expect you'll be pleasantly surprised.