For Quick Film Scans, Try an Olympus C-8080WZ! – By Dave Powell 

A friend recently asked if I could digitize some 35mm slides of a coastal Maine motel her family once owned. I decided to use an Olympus C-8080 WZ (Wide Zoom) bridge camera that I’d just purchased from another friend. It takes superb “Super Macros” and since its “scans” were going to be shared via email, the camera’s 8-megapixel files would be more than sufficient. Running some quick tests, I discovered that it was truly excellent for quickly and easily digitizing film.

NOTE: I considered using my Epson flatbed scanner, but past efforts produced somewhat “milky” results. And the process was slow.

Equipment

Here’s what I used. Beside the camera is a vintage Accura Duplivar slide-copier device. I also used a small light table (not shown):

I didn’t need the Duplivar’s main tube and slid the slide-holder frame off of its front. Then I glued two blocks of memory foam (outlined in white below) into the sides of the holder frame… and taped the holder to the front of the camera’s lens housing (also shown below):

TIP: Other manufacturers’ slide copiers might also work. But the tube-mounting tracks on the back of the Duplivar’s holder precisely straddle the camera’s lens housing… which made it easy to center the holder on the lens.

This setup:

• Automatically keeps the camera sensor and slides/negatives parallel, no matter how I move the camera.
• Allows me to point the camera at any light source, and at any angle. without slides/negatives moving around in the holder.
• Eliminates camera shake, even during longer hand-held exposures, and
• Reduces light intrusion into the sides of the frame (to maximize the contrast of scans) … thanks to the memory-foam blocks.

Camera Setup

To prepare the camera, I:

• Selected its lowest ISO (50) to minimize digital noise. (The camera’s circa-2004 ISO range– 50 to 400– means that digital noise really starts to creep in at around 200.)
• Set the camera to Super-Macro mode.
• Turned its command dial to aperture priority.
• And selected its smallest aperture (f/8) to maximize image sharpness and depth-of-field.

Scanning 35mm Slides

To digitize each slide, I:

1. Removed dust from its front and back with a soft lens brush.
2. Slid the slide into the tracks at the front of the Duplivar holder (with the transparency’s duller emulsion side facing the lens). TIP: I inserted both landscape and portrait images in a horizontal orientation (as shown in the above photo)… so that the camera wouldn’t cut off the tops and bottoms of vertical images.
3. Flipped the holder’s white diffuser plate up or down, depending on the light source. If shooting up toward a bright sky, I flipped the diffuser plate up in front of the slide… to keep clouds and trees from also appearing in the scan. And if shooting down toward my light table (my usual source), I flipped the plastic diffuser down out of the way because the light table has its own built-in diffuser.
4. Pointed the camera toward the light source, and
5. Took the shot. The camera often “hunted” for focus, but always locked on.

The process was fast and easy. It took mere seconds to digitize each slide.

My biggest surprise, though, was how closely the C-8080 WZ actually focuses! Its Reference Manual says that Super-Macro mode shoots down to 2 inches from the lens. But slides in the holder are only 0.75-inches away! This did prove to be a problem if I set the aperture wider than f/8. But at f/8, the lens’s depth-of-field expanded to include the slide location.

Sample Slide Scans

I wouldn’t post someone else’s family photos. But here are a few of my own Kodachrome memories! All but the last slide are as the camera captured them (with only minor rotation and cropping). My last slide promised to be difficult enough to require special processing, as you’ll see:

My wife Kate straddling the edge of her apartment-building roof, early in our relationship. (The original negative is slightly off-focus… my bad!)

It’s a little depressing that, as I creep toward my 75th year, more and more of my photos are becoming “historical” documents! Here, the lovely tall ship S/V Polynesia faces one of her last Caribbean sunsets… on one of Captain Mike’s Barefoot Windjammer Cruises. Today, neither company nor ship still ply the seas. The company ran aground in 2007 (it is said) due to family in-fighting, and the “Polly” now reportedly moulders away at a pier in Aruba. But our time on her decks remains a fond memory. NOTE: The severe vignetting probably resulted from my shooting into the sun with a telephoto. But the “spyglass” effect seems fitting here!

A sea captain’s gravestone, Deer Island, Maine. I left this image uncropped to show how the camera’s Super-Macro scans almost completely fill its 8-megapixel frame (easiest seen at the top).

Sunset, Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. Nice reproduction of subdued light!

Another Peggy’s Cove view.

Sunrise, Monhegan Island, Maine.

Stonehenge, early 1980s. Kate shoots a mean portrait!

I once collected Japanese “Godaikin” robots, which were big, transformable, and mostly metal! (Their invasion of American toy stores helped inspire Hasbro’s “Transformers” and other similar toy lines.) This “Garbin” figure was one of the more unique Godaikins– being a series of three fully jointed robot figures standing inside one another (like Russian nesting dolls). Another strangely transformable fellow was the large “Laserion,” who grew taller when one slipped colorful plastic inserts into his hollow leg frames. Marvelous pieces of engineering!

A Girl in a Tree

But the hardest slide to scan was one of the first photos I took in 1977… with my first SLR. I’d taken the Canon AE-1 for a walk in a park near my home, and as I entered, a girl called to me from a sunset-backlit tree:

“Are you a photographer?… Take my picture!”

Understandably distracted, I shot without checking focus, framing, shutter speed or aperture. And the slide turned out to be so dark, I could barely see the girl’s white jumpsuit in it… let alone her face. In fact, I kept it to (someday) digitize into a RAW file for intensive post-processing. Though I never saw her again, forty-five years on, this lovely young lady is finally sprung from her slide’s shadowy prison:

Since it was so dark, this slide is the only one for which I pointed the camera at a very bright sunlit sky (without the sun in the frame, of course). And again, it’s the only slide that I processed beyond minor rotation and cropping. All other slides are as they came from the camera, without any brightening, tonal adjustment or sharpening.

This girl in a tree may be hazy and out-of-focus. But she’s also beautiful… like many memories as one grows older!

Scanning 35mm Negatives

The physical process of digitizing negatives was almost the same. The biggest difference was that I extended the memory-foam blocks forward just enough to press negatives up against the white diffusion plate. This both held film strips firmly in place and flattened their frequent curvature. Like this:

Here’s a scan from the above strip of “Kodak Safety Film 5063” (AKA Tri-X):

Taken in 1977, it shows the “Four Calling Birds” and “Two Turtle Doves” sections of a tree decorated for the “Twelve Days of Christmas” in Boston’s historic Quincy Market. (I shot down into the tree from the second floor.)

And here’s a circa-1976 “historical” photo:

Since 1827, Durgin-Park had been a Boston institution, known for dishing out traditional New England fare (especially seafood and chowders). You came here expecting un-fancy, family-style meals at long tables with red-checkered cloths (some patrons can be seen here in the second-floor windows). One could also count on heaping helpings of surly server backtalk! It was fun jabbing back with some variant of “Oh yea? Well…”  A great night could be had by all, if one got into the spirit of the place! But the fun ended in 2019, when these doors closed against the onslaught of fancier, pricier eateries. TIP: If a street light isn’t working, line it up with a flood lamp on the wall behind it!

Next is a severely cropped color negative:

Kate and I were on a whale watch when this big fellow leaped completely out of the water! Kate got the shot with her Nikon L35AF just as he crashed back onto the surface. Our old drugstore print is OK, but it’s great to have this tighter digital crop! NOTE: This image area is slightly smaller than a 110-film negative.

Smaller Formats Too!

Since 35mm negatives worked out so well, I decided to try smaller APS and 110-film negatives. Bob Janes’  excellent 35mmc article about shooting, developing and scanning APS showed me how to draw the film out of its canister, and then reel it back in after scanning. The following sample turned out better than expected, considering that APS negatives are about half the size of 35mm:

And here’s a 110-film scan (of a negative only around one-quarter the size of 35mm):

Grain can be good! This tiny negative was exposed on a rainy early evening, as our taxi careened into chaotic Roman traffic.  (Amazingly, all vehicles in the area missed each other!) But grain and hand-held blur actually captured the Eternal City’s gritty, frenetic energy better than the sharper tourist snaps I got earlier in the day. Those little 110 cameras can still grab emotive images!

Great Camera, Great Scans

These generally excellent results didn’t surprise me. In 2004, reviewers widely praised the efforts Olympus engineers put into creating the C-8080 WZ’s “Zuiko quality” 5x macro zoom– with 15 elements in 13 groups (2 elements aspherical and 3 of ED glass). The lens was built to the company’s highest standards. In addition, the camera uses both xD and CF cards, which is good if… like I… you prefer one over the other. But one can insert both in the camera simultaneously… and switch between them on-the-fly.

Naturally, this setup can’t match the resolution of top-quality film scanners. But if you ever need good, quick, easy scans, it’s a great way to go. For many applications, the camera’s 3264×2448 captures should be fine. In fact, a 2018 Photo Jottings article claims that a 3,000-pixel-width is optimum! Specifically, it says: “there is no additional resolution from scanning at a higher sample rate.” It’d be interesting to hear readers’ opinions about this!

If you want to digitize your own slides or negatives, and already own a C-8080 WZ, vintage Duplivar copiers (under either Accura or Spiratone brands) currently sell for from $1 to $35 on the ‘Bay. And if you don’t already own an 8080 WZ, they currently sell there for $60 to $90 (though I’ve seen asking prices up to $285).

Final Thoughts

The C-8080 WZ may be “just” an 8-megapixel camera, but it would be a mistake to think its scans are substandard. As mentioned in this 35mmc article, I once exhibited and sold 16×20 prints taken with a 0.8MP camera! So one can actually do a lot with the 8080 WZ’s 8MP files.

In fact, I bought the camera from an image-quality expert who exhibited stunning prints of its files. And when he originally purchased the camera, he felt that no other digital he tested bested the 8080 WZ’s color fidelity and edge-to-edge image quality. Today, with online asking prices close to $300 (and people paying nearly $100 for it), the camera still seems to command respect.