dlp243 wrote in message <01bd57e8$7cf4f760$0fe212d1@dlp243prtel.com>...

>I have just bought a bellows\slide coppier unit. I put
>on a 50mm lens ( like the booklet said ) and when I
>try to get the slide in focus, the outside edge does not
>come in focus with the center of the picture. It seems
>fairly uniform which leads me to believe that it is a
>lens problem and not a bellows problem.
>Does anyone know if I need to put on a coppier type
>lens, or a macro lens to straighten the problem out, or
>is there something else wrong.


There are a couple of different problems, but maybe
you can get them to somewhat cancel out and give you
a solution! ;-) It is not uncommon for otherwise sharp
lenses to be unsharp-looking when used far out of their
normal focusing range (if the problem here is mostly
field curvature, there is hope for a solution...;-).
The slide itself (unless [ugh!] glass-mounted) is not
flat, and this is the major cause of unsharpness in slide
duping (though duping film itself is also not especially
sharp, alas, so dupes are never as sharp as the original).
You can try reversing the lens, using a macro lens
(no need for the bellows then...), using an enlarging
lens, or (most useful for me) copying with the slide
reversed (fits better my lens' field curvature, and
works even better than using a macro lens for me).
I assume that you are stopping down to at least f11...;-)
--
David Ruether
http://www.fcinet.com/ruether
ruether@fcinet.com