Camera as scanner

I’ve always used a Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 ED to digitize my old slides (35mm and medium format), but recently this scanner is giving me problems. It’s obviously getting old, and because Nikon also doesn’t support it anymore, it may not be worthwhile to get it repaired. I’ve thought about buying a new film scanner, but medium format scanners are very few and quite expensive, so I tried an alternative: If you have a macro lens that can offer you a magnification of more than 1:1 (such as a 1:1 macro lens on a ‘cropped’ camera body, or a 1:1 macro lens with an extra extension ring), you can make a series of partial enlargements of your slide. Using Photoshop’s ‘PhotoMerge’ function (or any other panorama software) you can assemble these images to get one, high resolution copy of your slide. The larger than 1:1 is important for 35mm slides, to get enough detail. For larger slides such as 6×7 cm slides, a 1:1 macro will do fine. I use the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x lens, which offers up to 5:1(!) macro. I get very good results with 4 shots. I shoot in RAW, stitch the images together and then decrease the final image size to about 6000 x 4000 pixels and sharpen. The results are as good or even better than the Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 scans. Left a small section of a scan, right the same section in the ‘DSLR scan’.