I was digitizing a couple of negatives yesterday evening when the stupid scanner stopped working. It has been flaky for a couple of weeks already, but nothing I could not repair. This time however, it was beyond repair (one of the stepper motors burnt out and replacing it with a new one just is too expensive for this thing).

The problem is, we had to put down one of our pets last friday and my wife wants almost all pictures we have from him (a couple of hundred!) digitized so they can be shown on a digital frame. I, on the other hand, do not want to invest a lot in a new scanner.

So, I was thinking to McGyver something. Got an old enlarger that I can cannibalize, was planning to at least use the filmholder and maybe the diffusor system from that. Mount it on a fixed setup somehow with a camera so that I could simply take pictures of the negatives. Did anyone create such a thing before? Any pointers or any experiments in this direction that you want to share experiences with?