Using an LCD monitor as a makeshift lightbox
I have a friend in another state with a high resolution 35mm film scanner, and he offered to digitize my old album of slides for archival purposes. My slide book is a standard 3-ring binder from the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, filled with Vue-All pages with a 4-across 5-down slide pocket layout. So here I have these nice pages of slides... and it's 2006... and it's been like 15 years since I owned a light table... crap. Thanks to my electronics and optics work I have plenty of loupes, but no sorter with backlight.
Or do I?
This is a sheet of my slides, still in the 3-ring plastic page, laying on my Samsung 204T LCD monitor, at the greatest angle the standard pivot will allow. The monitor is "displaying" a fullscreen all-white image. That's it! End of trick. It's that easy.
Is it color correct? Pretty friggin close! Closer than tungsten, closer even than florescent. It was designed that way! Your color LCD monitor is likely the best reference standard for "daylight-balanced light" than any other light source you own.
Don't you need a diffuser? Well, not really. If I took the slides out of the page and layed them on the monitor surface (stupid fucking idea, BTW, don't try this at home) I could faintly see the monitor's pixel pattern in areas of the slide that were clear, but if I left the slides in the sleeve and just held it right in front of the monitor I couldn't see any problems at all. This would be my suggested way of doing it, as even resting a plastic sheet of slides on the surface of your LCD monitor is highly likely to scratch it with very little repetition.
Is there any advantage over a conventional light table or slide tray sorter? Well, one practical one and one stupid one. The pratical benefit is that you very likely own a color LCD monitor, and you likely do not own a light table or slide tray sorter. It's 2006, ya know? The dubious, but technologically very cool, benefit is you can actually mix color into the white in Photoshop and effectively "change the white balance". Shot a bunch of images indoors with no flash on tungsten film under florescent tubes? No sweat. Just pink up the white until you are happy. Images all badly overexposed? Turn that white to gray to lower the light output; it ain't a proper contrast reduction but it helps for visual inspection. However, as I said this is really mostly a theoretical benefit and not one I plan on using or would seriously advocate. That said, first geek who writes a "digital lightbox with adjustable white balance and gray point" should definitely send me a copy and I'll try it out.
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