Customer Reviews

Opteka HD² Slide Copier for Nikon D5000, D3100, D3000, D700, D300, D200, D100, D90, D80, D70, D60, D50, D40, D40x, D2HS, D2XS, D3 Digital SLR Cameras

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The Opteka HD2 Slide duplicator has two problems.

1. Some old paper mounted Kodak slides are slightly too large and must be forced into the slide slot. Pliars must be used to remove them.

2. The slide is not in correct alignment and cannot be pushed down far enough to fill the viewfinder, leaving a black band across the bottom of the frame. Thus one must either zoom in slightly to fill the frame thereby loosing part of the picture, or crop out the black bar afterwards using a photo editor.

If I bought another slide copier, it would be the model with the movable slide receiver.

I ordered the Slide Copier to digitize some family slides for a friend and I thought at the time of the purchase that if it didn't work that well that I wouldn't be out much money. I was really surprised. The copier couldn't be easier to use. You just screw it onto the end of a lens (using one of the rings that are included). I used the Nikon 18-135mm lens. You put the slide holder into the end and insert a couple of slides. I used a tripod with a lamp (or the window) at the end of the copier for the light source that is needed to see the slide through the viewfinder of the camera. You adjust the exposure and WB on the camera and the zoom on the copier. I took pictures of 3 slide carousels in one day. I used the Nikon Camera Control program to see the captured image immediately on my computer.

If you want to digitize old (or new) slides, this is a simple, inexpensive and remarkable little gadget. For anybody who has slides, why drag out the projector? Just take pictures of them and view them on your monitor as a slideshow or print out the pictures. This is a very good idea for gift giving to any photographer who has ever used slide film.

There is some assembly and experimentation required: I find that shooting a nef (raw) file and adjusting the color makes old slides come back to life. It's way better than the scanners I've tried, but probably not the same as a dedicated slide scanner. If you have a high resolution digital camera, it's a good and inexpensive add-on.

I have found the Slider Copier a wonderful tool for archiving the family slider collection. It is easy to use and the picture turn out pretty darn good with my Nikon D80. It says to use a light but I recommend shooting out a window with natural light, you get better quality that way... in my humble opinion.

I'm getting very good results with the Opteka HD2 slide copier. I've got a few thousand mounted color slides I want scanned, taken mostly by my father in the 50's and 60's. I've been working on this project for a few years off and on, but it is very time consuming. I've been using a Canon MP980 flatbed scanner/printer at 4000dpi and felt the images came out ok, but to get the best results from it scanning time was more than 4 minutes per slide. Only being able to do 4 slides at a time made this hugely time intensive.
A few months ago I came across the ImageBox 9MP at Costco.com that snaps pictures of the slides instead of scanning them, as such it takes seconds to do each slide. The results, however, were muddy pictures with very poor dynamic range. (Dark areas would just be black, light areas completely washed out.) The images look something like you'd expect out of a cheap, 3MP camera from 10 years ago. The ImageBox got returned to the store.
I thought why can't I do the same thing with my Nikon D7000 and its excellent sensor, and came across this cheap Opteka slide copier on Amazon. At its low price, I did not expect much but felt it was worth a try. After much initial experimentation, I am getting excellent results quickly and easily with this set up:
- RAW images with the D7000
- 50mm, 1.8 nikkor prime lens
- My LCD monitor as a light source
- Auto focus and white balance, center weighted metering
- Aperture priority at f11, ISO 100
As mentioned by others, the kit 55-200 lens won't work as it will not focus close enough. The results with the 18-55 had drab colors and were fuzzy, also the filter ring on this lens rotates when focusing, making it nearly unusable with the Opteka.
I also have the 18-105, D7000 kit lens, my Opteka shipped with an adapter to make it fit its filter size. This lens works, and at 105mm the slide image nearly fills the sensor area, but there was a lot of color fringing, the corners of the images were dark and the whole thing just not very sharp. This setup worked, the results just aren't very satisfying.
Using the cheap, but excellent 50mm prime, I end up having to crop away about 30% of the final image to get rid of the black boarder, but the resulting image is still a very respectable 11 megapixels. More importantly, the images are sharp right down to the pixel level (if the original was sharp) and the colors are excellent. The corners are a bit soft if you look closely but the lighting is even and there is very little distortion.
When I bought this, I did not realize you could detach the barrel and use the remaining "macro" lens to take close up pictures when screwed to the end of any lens with a 52mm filter size. I happened to see Opteka's 10x Macro HD2 (also a filter thread, screw on attachment for a regular lens and also cheap) and ordered it as well just for fun. (I'd love a real macro lens.) I just tried this on the slide copier instead of the one it came with and now my slide images fill a bit more of the camera's sensor and the corners that came out slightly soft before are now sharp.
About the lighting, I've tried a number of light sources throughout my home, including daylight, but nothing works as well and is as even as using the white background on my computer LCD monitor. I get the most consistently good results using auto white balance.
The slide carrier that comes with the copier is definitely its weakest link. I do not have to use pliers like someone else said to remove slides, but they are tight. Sliding the carrier through the lens attachment was even tighter, and little plastic scrapings would come off and sometimes get on the slides or frosted glass and show up in the final pictures. After using this on 50-100 slides it loosened up and now is quite usable.
Using Lightroom 3 I can quickly crop and straighten, if needed, a large number of my raw files.
Again, my photos with this setup are coming out way better than anything else I've tried, and I bet they are a better than you'd get from most of the bulk slide copying services you can find out there. I'm sure professional services are capable of giving you excellent digital slide copies but at a price too high for most to justify for more than a few images at a time. Dedicated slide scanners that do at least as good a job are pricy, and WAY slower.
Given all this, I'm giving this copier 5 stars in spite of its shortcomings, especially taking into consideration its price. I'd post a couple samples here but Amazon does not show high enough resolution customer images to make it worthwhile. I may finally be able to get this project done without making it my lifetime's work.

I am a dentist and I am using this devices and expert with it from a long time ago,I used it to dublicate my old-cases slides and X-rays for my master study,so I was happy when I used these kind of nikon slide dublicator because it is an easy and accurate dublicator and I recommend you to use it with nikon 55-200mm DX AF-S Lens because it fits directly to this lens without the need of the adapting rings also if you feel the duplicated Pictures dark or if the original picture is dark then I recoomend you to make duplication while the duplicator`s Screen is very close to the light source(or to the window if you capture in daylight witch is better) in order to capture a perfect image and for easy focusing also I recommend you to set the camera to capture JPEG+Raw picture format because with Raw picture format you can adjust the contrast,opacity,brightness and the saturation of the pictures in order to acheive better result and don`t worry if your adobe photoshop Cs2 couldn`t open the Raw format,all what you should do is download the Camera Raw Plug-in that is compatable with your camera(for example my nikon D40 Plug-in is Camera Raw 3.7,also work with D70s,for D50 Camera Raw 3.2,for Nikon D80 Camera Raw 3,6,and so on)you can search for the Camera Raw Plug-in that`s compatable with your camera at adobe.com web-site,and believe me you will be astonished from the final result by adobe photoshop in your pictures.
I recommend You to bye this product from amazon.com because they give you an A-Z guirantee , I bought mine from 47th Street Photo through amazon.com and I recieve it from this seller with manifacture damage of the ring that connect the duplicator tube to it`s screen lens and the seller never respond to my e-mails but immediatly after I contact amazon.com they gave me the A-Z guirantee and refund my credit card

I bought this device so that I could use my Nikon D70 with 18-70mm f3.5-4.5 lens. The kit states, correctly, that it will fit this combination and includes the necessary adapter ring. What Opteka do not point out is that the large diameter mismatch between the camera lens and the copier means that, if the zoom is set to make the slide fill the sensor, the edges are badly distorted. Zooming out to around 50mm solves this problem but means that only about 70% of the sensor is used, with consequent loss of resolution. Attaching it to a lens with a smaller frontal diamter will ease the problem, so the lens supplied with the D50 and D40 cameras will be more suitable.

It takes a bit of experimentation to get good bright results but the potential is there.

There are a lot of different ways to convert slides into images. And almost all of the cheap ones are flawed in one way or another. We initially used a a $100 scanner. It worked OK, but the software was atrocious. There was no way to adjust the exposure, and the highlights kept getting blown out.

We settled on the Opteka because it lets us use our D90's hardware to get all the details right. My only frustration is that you need to have a lens with a 52mm thread in order to attach it. Most of the Nikon Kit Zooms are 52mm, so you probably already have one. My 18-200 zoom was to big to attach. You will want to be able to zoom past 55mm or else you will need to crop the edges of the image.

The other gotcha is that you need good lighting in order to get sharp images. If you are making your copies at night, I found the best way is to point it at a mirror and use your camera's flash (or better yet one of Nikon's add on flashes).

If you already have a Nikon digital camera (DX) and the right lens, this approach will let you get superior results at a low price. Better still, you can use the software you already know and enjoy which is a huge benefit if you are doing a lot of slides.

I'm very pleased with the results of this slide copier.

It let's me digitize my slides quickly using my camera (using a scanner is a little too tedious for this job).

Also, using auto-exposure on the camera the resulting image is almost always perfect: Even for my under exposed slides, on auto-expose the camera gives more exposure time to register these and they come out quite well exposed.

The only negative: I have found that handling the unit (putting in slides) causes a little adjustment in the lens focus. You have to use manual focus when using this copier, and you have to verify your focus for each slide.

This product is great. I received it from 47th Street photo in a few days. I have a dedicated slide scanner(Minolta DiMage Scan Dual 4). The Minolta works great but would have taken ages since I have a few thousand images to scan. I used the Opteka with a Nikon D70 (I didn't want to wear down the shutter on my D300) and a 50mm 1.8 prime lens. The filter thread size on this lens is 52mm like the Opteka. At f9 it works great. It works best with daylight, but do not point it directly towards a bright sun because the image will look very grainy. Possibly due to the matte translucent backing on the unit. The image fills about 70% of the screen. I ordered a 62-52mm stepdown ring to use it with my 60mm 2.8 Nikor Macro, it did a better job of filling the screen and picture quality was a little sharper. I'm pretty happy with the speed that I'm able to do this and the color is great. NEF should give you even more control of the results.