I don't have anything to add besides that I think it's a very cool and creative project, and another good reason to keep that crate of cables and adapters in the basement...
My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#12I'm not surprised at all about having to use an old computer to get this thing to work. This will become the norm with scanners unless someone with more money than sense decides to enter the market. Nearly all of the good consumer-grade scanners (i.e. those that use CCD sensors) are out of production and use software that is no longer maintained. The main market for scanners has become receipts, which has lead to a s…
I can run Nikon Scan on an XP VM or use VueScan which is modern and has a complete feature set
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#13These "antique" scanners give out such good quality, but it's a shame they're so awkward to use. I was too scared of a reconditioned hand-me-down and having to deal with missing trays and emulated windows XP. Instead, I managed to get a consistent-ish setup for scanning negatives using a Sony A7 III camera, though this was a case of digitising an existing collection, so I went through them all in one go with a 3d printed mask and feed mechanism.
With the author lamenting about SD cards being awkward; it reminds me of one thing has been immensely useful with the A7 III is the built-in FTP auto-upload. This surprised me as reviews didn't mention it, and as a seeminly high-end consumer camera I wasn't expecting such a "professional" feature. I just have it upload everything to my NAS.
Now my next task is to do the same with thousands of dirty slides, which is turning out to be far more challenging...
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#14I'm not surprised at all about having to use an old computer to get this thing to work. This will become the norm with scanners unless someone with more money than sense decides to enter the market. Nearly all of the good consumer-grade scanners (i.e. those that use CCD sensors) are out of production and use software that is no longer maintained. The main market for scanners has become receipts, which has lead to a s…
I bought a V800 about 10 years ago for film scanning and it worked with modern computers. The quality was quite good as well; I wet-mounted my negatives and had pretty much no complaints with the quality. Speed was not amazing, of course.
I ended up with a flatbed and not a film scanner because I wanted to scan 4x5 negatives.
If I were being rational, I'd just get an A7R or Fuji's medium format DSLR for 90% of my photos and have 4x5" and larger negatives professionally scanned. For proofing, I always found taking a picture of the negative on a lightbox with my phone and inverting to be adequate. If you like the photo in that form, then you'll like the professional scan.
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#15As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice.
Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optical resolution of 2700DPI, which means the absolute maximum megapixel resolution you can get out of that thing is a little over 10MP. Film scanners are notorious for overstating their optical resolution, which has nothing to do with the resolution of sensor used to digitize the image data and everything to do with the lens in the scanner. You can have a 200MP sensor scanning your film but if your lens can only resolve 1000DPI you will have a very high resolution image of a low resolution lens projection. It's maybe a little better than a flatbed and it features dust removal, but in the year of our lord 2024 the LS-2000 is not a good choice for scanning film.
As for his macro scanning setup, he appears to be using the digitaliza for film holding, which is a notoriously bad product with many known flaws. Negative supply makes a line of lower cost version of their very good film holders, and Valoi also offers an affordable system of components that I highly recommend. There is a ton of good information out there about macro scanning, and had the OP sought it out he could avoided his little adventure in retro computing.
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#16As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article provides particularly good advice. Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an advertised optica…
Also, the LS-2000 is a noisy POS. I owned this thing for years (bought new) and put plenty of time into it. It just sucks. It was only mediocre for slides and black-&-white negatives; for color negatives it was nearly useless. You could never remove the base negative color and retain good image color. The dynamic range sucked.
I sold it on eBay years ago, then researched what might be better. The general opinion was that consumer-accessible scanning peaked with the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 II. Of course these were long out of manufacture, but I managed to find one new in the box on a small auction site. To this day I haven't gotten around to scanning a single piece of film with it. Maybe this post will finally get me off my ass...
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#17These "antique" scanners give out such good quality, but it's a shame they're so awkward to use. I was too scared of a reconditioned hand-me-down and having to deal with missing trays and emulated windows XP. Instead, I managed to get a consistent-ish setup for scanning negatives using a Sony A7 III camera, though this was a case of digitising an existing collection, so I went through them all in one go with a 3d pri…
Some fujifilm cameras support it seedms: https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_.... Overall this seems better suited for tethered shooting with direct usb-c transfer.
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#18Allow me a moment here to ask - could someone please build a modern Epson V600 that can process at least three frames of 6x7 medium format film at once?
This area of tech seems totally stagnant (obviously) but seems like a great time for someone with some hardware smarts and interest to innovate for low cost.
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#19I'm not surprised at all about having to use an old computer to get this thing to work. This will become the norm with scanners unless someone with more money than sense decides to enter the market. Nearly all of the good consumer-grade scanners (i.e. those that use CCD sensors) are out of production and use software that is no longer maintained. The main market for scanners has become receipts, which has lead to a s…
I bought a V800 about 10 years ago for film scanning and it worked with modern computers. The quality was quite good as well; I wet-mounted my negatives and had pretty much no complaints with the quality. Speed was not amazing, of course. I ended up with a flatbed and not a film scanner because I wanted to scan 4x5 negatives. If I were being rational, I'd just get an A7R or Fuji's medium format DSLR for 90% of my pho…
Well, from my experience of going both seriously digital and seriously darkroom, i'd keep the two apart. Get a lovely 5x4 enlarger (or join a darkroom where one is available) and you'll enjoy making B&W prints from those negatives much more than you'll enjoy scanning them and looking at them on a screen.
Re: My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
#20Got to shout out to VueScan for making obsolete scanners usable on modern operating systems. It's not free, but is reasonably priced. If you can physically connect your scanner (scsi2usb is an exercise left to the reader), then it's likely to let you use it.