A High-Speed Slide Scanner Build

April 21, 2019 by 19 Comments

Photographic slides were popular in the middle part of the 20th century, but are long forgotten now. If you’ve found a handful in a dusty attic, you might consider sending them away to be digitized professionally, or using a flatbed scanner at home. [Bryan Howard] found himself with over 200,000 slides, however, so that just wouldn’t do. Instead, he endeavored to build an automated scanner of his own. 

Like many similar projects, [Bryan] started with an existing slide projector as a base. This means that all the difficult work of slide transport is already taken care of. The projector has then been upgraded with an LED light source and other tweaks befitting its new role. An Arduino Pro Micro runs the show, firing off the camera to image each slide before loading the next one into place. The DSLR responsible for imaging is then hooked up to a PC so the incoming images can be checked while the machine is in operation.

Preliminary tests are promising, with the scanner successfully capturing several slides in a row. [Bryan] estimates that, with a capture time of between 1 and 2 seconds per slide, it should take somewhere between 2-5 days to image the entire collection.

We wish [Bryan] the best of luck with the project, and look forward to seeing the final results. We’ve seen similar work before, too. Video after the break.

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Open Source Scanner Scans The Slides

December 26, 2023 by 9 Comments

What do you get when you join a slide projector and a digital camera? Filmolimo, an open source slide scanner. The scanner uses an M5Stack Fire, an ESP32 development board. Thanks to the ESP32, you can control the device via WiFi.

All the project files, including KiCAD design files, are on GitHub. Of course, you will probably have to adapt things to your specific camera and slide projector. The PCB is double-sided and looks easy to put together. The board is mostly opto-isolation and interface between the controller and the equipment. The software allows you to change things like the time between slides, for example.

This is one of those projects you probably only need for a bit. Unless, of course, you regularly scan slides. You can farm it out to a service provider, but what fun is that? If you have a few hundred thousand slides, you might need to go for speed. If you just have a few, you can get by with a simple adapter.

An image of a miniature diorama of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. On the left is a more detailed 1/6 scale model with a tall, dark haired Snow White and dwarves with red caps and tan tunics. The image on the right is of a much smaller and less detailed set of miniatures. The figures's proportions are a little more uncanny and feel like a low budget Disney rip-off.

How Did They Make View-Master Slides?

June 16, 2026 by 19 Comments

The basics of producing a stereophotograph of real life places were well-established by the time the View-Master arrived, but producing images of imaginary scenes was a bit more involved. [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble] took a look at how the fairy tale and media tie-in reels may have been made.

Starting with simple dioramas, View-Master eventually developed an entire team to work on fairy tales. One of the most influential members was sculptor [Florence Thomas]. She was instrumental in updating many of the original fairy tale reels from small scale miniatures to 1/6 scale dioramas for the scenes. Unfortunately, the department was eventually cut and all the original miniatures thrown away.

Before VCRs, View-Master was the primary way people could interact with their favorite TV shows and movies when they weren’t being broadcast. TV shows could be photographed while in production in Hollywood with a stereo camera giving great visual detail. Some cartoon and movie reels were less engaging, having been made from promotional images, giving more of a paper cutout appearance rather than “real” 3D. In either case, many of these visual techniques have been lost with little documentation on how they were achieved.

We previously covered [View Master Travels and Peter Dibble]’s History of the View-Master and how you can digitize the disks for posterity.

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Scrap Vintage Camera Goes Digital With Scanner Parts

April 4, 2026 by 3 Comments

Every collector ends up with items that are worthless, usually because they are broken or incomplete. When [Graindead] found a 1920s glass-plate reflex camera for pennies with plenty of missing parts, it was obvious that what he had was a piece of junk. Throw it away? No, he turned it digital with the aid of a small document scanner.

A reflex camera like this one is the ancestor of the 35mm single-lens reflex cameras we may still be familiar with today, in that is has a flip-up mirror inside to bounce the light onto a ground glass screen. The photographer can see what the lens sees to set up the shot, before flipping the mirror out of the way and exposing the glass plate film by pulling out a dark slide. This one was missing the ground glass and the lens, so he has to grind a replacement, and bodge in a similar-age Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.

In the video below you can see the build, and a range of pictures including some trichrome colour shots. It gives an imperfect result even compared to the same camera with its period film, but the point here is the art rather than the clarity. We’d take this one out with us, if it were ours.

For more vintage digital fun, have a look at a similar adaptation that shoots video.

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Upgraded Film Scanner Handles Bigger Formats At No Cost

July 30, 2022 by 3 Comments

Film scanners are a useful tool for digitizing slides and negatives, and the Plustek 8100 that [Christian Chapman] had was capable, but limited to small format film only. Rather than pay for a much more expensive medium format scanner that could handle 120 film, he modified his 8100 to accomplish the same thing with a combination of good old software and hardware tampering.

On the software side, [Christian] modified a driver for the Plustek 8100 so that it sweeps the scan head further than usual. At the application level, to scan medium format frames, it does a total of four scans: one for each quadrant. The results get stitched together in software with a thoughtfully-designed shell script that provides previews and handles failures and restarts gracefully.

Hardware-wise, the scanning carriage needs modification to ensure nothing interferes with the scan head as it moves further than originally designed. Some CAD and 3D printing made short work of this. Incidentally, this hardware mod is an excellent demonstration of one of the core strengths of 3D printing: the ability to make geometrically-straightforward objects that would nevertheless be troublesome or impractical to construct in any other way.

3D Printed Adapter Puts Slides In Their Best Light

October 12, 2021 by 10 Comments

If you’ve got old family photos on slides there’s an excellent chance you’ve considered digitizing them at one point or another, but perhaps didn’t know the best way of going about it. In that case, this 3D printed adapter designed by [Rostislav Persion] that lets you photograph slides with a standard DSLR may be exactly what you were waiting for.

The idea is simple enough, you place the slide inside the adapter, get your focus right, and snap a picture. But of course, you’ve also got to provide some illumination. In this case, the camera is mounted on a tripod and pointed at an appropriate light source. Once you’ve experimented a bit and got the image backlit the way you want it, you can lock everything in place and easily power through a stack of vintage family memories in no time.

For such a straightforward concept, we really appreciate the little details in the execution. For example, rather than just sliding a 3D printed cylinder over the DSLR’s lens, [Rostislav] came up with a foam-padded “shim” that’s strong enough to hold the adapter on without marring anything. The two-part slide spacer that features a bit of springiness to hold everything tight is also a very nice touch.

An approach like this should work nicely for the amount of slides most families are likely to have, but if you’re in a position where you need to digitize thousands of images, some automation would certainly help things along.

Scanner Captures View-Master Discs As Glorious 3D Videos

May 12, 2021 by 25 Comments

The toys of the past may have been cheesy, but you can’t deny the creativity needed to build something engaging without any electronics. One stalwart toy from this category is View-Master, the little stereoscopic slide viewer that brought the world to life in seven vibrant scenes. And digitizing these miniature works of art is the purpose of this neat View-Master reel scanner project.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of using a View-Master, the gist is that a flat cardboard disc ringed with 14 color transparencies was inserted into a plastic viewer. Binocular eyepieces showed scenes from opposing pairs of slides, which were illuminated by a frosted screen and room lighting. The scenes were photographed from slightly different angles, leading to a stereoscopic image that was actually pretty good quality.

In the video below, project creator [W. Jason Altice] describes View-Master as “the YouTube of the 1950s.” We partially agree; with only seven frames to tell a story, we’d say it’s more like TikTok than YouTube. Regardless, capturing these mini-movies requires quite a bit of complexity. All the parts for the reel carousel are 3D-printed, with a small stepper to advance the reel and an optical sensor to register its position. A ring of RGB LEDs beneath the reel illuminates the slides; being able to control the color of the light helps with color balancing for slides with faded colors. An 8-megapixel camera captures each slide, and some pretty slick software helps with organizing the image pairs, tweaking their alignment, capturing the captions from the disc, and stitching everything into a video.

There’s a whole YouTube channel devoted to View-Master captures, which are best viewed with a Google Cardboard or something similar. Even without the 3D effect, it’s still pretty cool to watch [Popeye] beat up a nuke again.

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