To assess negatives or slides, you can simply hold them up to a lamp or against the window. A light table is much better for checking. If you don’t have one, you can simply use a smartphone or tablet.
The display of such a device (which you are more likely to own than a light table) can be set bright enough to be able to sufficiently illuminate analogue photographic negatives and slides on it.
Those who own a tablet – i.e. the larger version of a smartphone – have even more luminous surface available. However, the display of a mobile phone is already sufficient to view slides and negatives up to 6×9 format.
You just need to turn the screen of your device to pure white and to maximum brightness. To get the pure white background, you only have to open a photo which has nothing but pure white on it. We have made such photo available for you to download:
You can further use a magnifying glass to see the details. However, with a magnifying glass, you will also see the individual pixels of the display! To avoid this, you would have to put a kind of “frosted glass film” on the display of the tablet/smartphone. However, this in turn reduces the luminosity.
For quick checking and selecting slides or negatives, however, a mobile phone or smartphone is perfectly suitable as a mini light table.