: So I got a question. Lets say I drag out my medium format camera at the next
: kayak meet. What's a good, user friendly affordable way of getting digital
: images from 120 film?

Hewlett-Packard makes a couple of nice flatbed scanners that have attachments for scanning transparencies. These devices usually have their own lighting arrangement, and plug into the scanner throuh a dedicated port. I've seen various sized transparency adapters. Some hold a single transparency up to 2 1/4 square, others hold 3 or 4 35mm slides or negatives and there is one that goes up to 4x5. Depending on model of scanner and store you'll be looking at upp to $300, which is high these days for a scanner, but the top of the line have scan patterns finer than 1000 dpi. Fro 120 square, that's about 5 megapixels, which rivals the top digital cameras available, and easily gives high quality enlargements to 11 x 14. And of course you can make lower res images for posting online pix to webpages.

Digital scans take 30 seconds or more. There are faster ways. Fuji and Leica shared technology and made a similar camera a few years ago. They also sold an attachment for it which was a very simple 35mm slide copier that mounted solidly to the camera. Provide your own lightsource, or aim the contaption at the sky to backlight your slide, and push the button on the camera. In a second or so your image is captured with the resolution of the camera
(about 1.3 megapixels).

With the difference in frame shape, this works out to about 800 dpi on the 34x36mm image (roughly 1 by 1.5 inches). Great for getting pictures into webpages and for cataloging slides and negatives (yup, you can invert the colors and get color prints from them out of your inkjet printer)

From 1.3 megapixels quality to 5x7 is great, and I've gotten some nice 8x10s, and even a few 11x14s when the subject, cropping and lighting were just right.

With any other camera, a slide copying attachment could be improvised. Closeup lenses in the +10 diopter range are available at camera stores and can be fitted over digital camera lenses to allow them to focus close enough for copying 120 images.

Hope this helps.

PGJ