I copied slides for about a year using a light box and a point 'n shoot compact digital in macro mode. The quality was excellent, not very different to what I can now obtain with a decent slide scanner, but obviously at a lower resolution (1200x1600). I needed to add a supplementary lens to fill the frame with a 35mm slide, although it just about filled the frame with 6x6 trannies. One slight negative point; using a camera rather than a scanner proper may introduce slight barrel or pincushion distortion particularly if, like me, you were using a wide angle lens in effect (onj the digicam). It was only obvious however on buildings or the like.

I also have one that I got from Jessops second hand for £49. At this price, you can't criticise it too much, but I would agree that they are not brilliant. One thing to note; the ND or plain filters screwed in the back are part of the optical train - if you remove them, or don't put them in, then the quality of the image is degraded.

At it's best, it performs much like a 200 mm lens plus a 2x teleconverter. The BIG problem I see with it is the size. It's small, and you're fooled into not using a serious tripod, but you must do so or you'll get camera shake. Mine works best in high contrast (sun)conditions, with a film such as Provia 100F or Sensia and using my Unilock 1600 Major tripod.

Note also that the aperture is fixed at f8, which is a real pain.

Norton's by Ian Ridpath is a standard astronomy work you can find in most public libraries which gives indications of exposure times that I have found to be accurate. For the moon, don't forget it's about 1/2 degree in diameter, which means that you need a long focal length to get a decent sized image. I use my DIY refractor telescope (1500mm focal length, 105 mm aperture) which works well, and 500 mm mirror lens, which works at a pinch.

I have a very cheap Jessops lightbox I use for sorting slides. The useful area is about 6x4", although the corners are not quite as bright as the rest. I mount the digicam vertically over the box, slide or negative in the centre, and use the autofocus and autoexposure.

If I need to come closer than the macro facility of the camera will allow (9cm), I use a 4 cm focus achromat lens placed 4cm from the slide, with the camera as close to the lens as I can get. This will allow me to fill the frame with 35mm slides or negatives.

I've successfully "scanned" medium format negatives with my point and shoot digital in macro mode, using a light box. It gives me 1200x1600 images which are much better than needed for the web. Using Photshop, PSP or Irfanview will convert the negative images to positives.

I use a range of bodies (ME Super, K1000 and Super A) with either a Tamron SP90 macro lens - stunning) or 50 mm lenses with extension tubes. This latter option works very well, albeit with less flexibility than a macro lens. However, the small apertures needed to get a decent depth of field in close-up often produce diffraction softening of the image. For example, any lens, macro or not, set at f22 and used to produce a lifesize image is really working at f44, even if it's a macro lens. This means that the diffraction limit in terms of lines per mm is about 50 lpm (100 divided by f number). Combined with a film even as good as Velvia, this will give noticeably soft images at high enlargement.