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A modern 35mm film scanner for home

soke.engineering

31–40 of 198 posts

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#31
Film doesn't really make sense anymore outside the realm of luxury-budget art. And if so, why 35mm? Why not medium format / Hasselblads, or large format? Why not actually go for the format sizes where there's a reasonable argument that film can produce a better end result compared to DSLRs?

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#33
post #6

As someone who has a mirrorless scanning setup for my film, and pondered getting a dedicated scanner... the price of this is quite steep given how inflexible of a tool it is. A second hand DSLR setup is going to be roughly the same price or less. I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers. If you want fancy and experimental, filmomat has arguably a more interesting but pricier offering. B…

I almost missed the price. Wow you're right that's a lot! And the final retail price is 1599 euros. I have a good Plustek that cost me $300 or $400. Automated transport and unantiquated software sounds nice, but those features are not worth an extra $600-1,100 to me. Am I missing something or is this supposed to be in another tier of image quality?

It's actually a lower DPI and no IR sensor.

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#34
I still have an expensive Canon dedicated slide/film scanner from 20 years ago.

IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.

Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.

But it was painfully slow.

This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.

Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#36
I gave up trying to read the article when animations started happening when I scrolled. It's annoying and I have better things to do than waste time waiting for your animations to stutter and finish moving around when I'm trying to scan the article. Good luck with whatever you're trying to do.

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#37
I'm glad this exists but at ~1k EUR I would be interested if it could scan 120 medium format negatives...but the fact that it does not is an absolute deal breaker for me. It seems like they are considering it. I hope they do figure that out sooner than later.

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#38

When it comes to the light source, it's a huge missed opportunity. The next wave of film scanning involves capturing Red, Green and Blue separately (separate narrow-band LEDs) to better isolate C-41 layers and counteract crossover on the image sensor. And yes, it should have an IR pass as well, for dust removal. With that said, I'm happy to see new film products released in 2025/2026. Hopefully this is just the first…

This sounds really interesting! Do you have any info about that scanning process?

I should have dropped a link! Check out this project:

https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#39
post #31

Film doesn't really make sense anymore outside the realm of luxury-budget art. And if so, why 35mm? Why not medium format / Hasselblads, or large format? Why not actually go for the format sizes where there's a reasonable argument that film can produce a better end result compared to DSLRs?

35mm is super cheap to get into if you just want to experiment. Old 35mm cameras and even home darkroom equipment are gathering dust in tens of thousands of households, cheap on FBM or thrift shops.

It's expensive compared to digital for snapshots, but if you enjoy working in the darkroom as a hobby, you can probably get everything you need for free or cheap.

Re: A modern 35mm film scanner for home

#40
post #23

I wish the fancy scroll nonsense would go away. For example I wanted to look at the first picture in the horizontal gallery that scrolls horizontally when you scroll vertically. However, there is no way for me to view the whole image. Either it is cutoff at the bottom, or it starts horizontally scrolling. Switching from vertical to horizontal scrolling is awkward and I just want to skip the gallery. scrolling on that…

It’s a cancer on the web. Apple started it and I hate them for it. And I’m an Apple fan.

If I wanted to wait 1/2 second for each part of the page to load I’d have stayed on dialup.

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