21–30 of 62 posts
Allow 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.
Got 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.
I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered shooting it 10 years ago
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The main reason I shoot film is for higher resolution than digital. I can easily get 100 megapixels from my 4x5 negatives. I have a nice shot of the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, and you can zoom in on the TIFF and read the road signs on the FDR across the river. I think that's neat. That's what I'm out for.
As 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…
Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad film imagers for a number of reasons, a few which you already wrote. There's a huge volume of new products coming out for scanning right now (film holders, copy stands, light panels, etc) but these setups are very inconvenient to set up or, to be charitable, demand practice and perfect technique. There's always people ready to insist they have an easy convenient time setting up their SLR scanners and capturing 1000 rolls at 9999 DPI in 2 minutes. I don't share their experience.
During the pandemic I tried to proof-of-concept a path forward without any real success:
- The first attempt involved modifying a Plustek scanner to take medium format. This ended up taking a ton of work for each medium format frame (4 captures for each of the 4 quadrants, and each of those is already slow for a single 35mm frame). Stitching these captures is tedious and flaky for images that don't have obvious sharp features.
- The other involved rigging the objective of a Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera onto an Ender printhead to raster over the film with a light table. This could have worked but it had many mechanical problems I am not cut out to solve (lens mount, camera-to-film-plane alignment)
Leaving aside designing a proper optical path there are 2 killer problems:
- the problem of mechanically manipulating the negative and keeping it in focus
- the problem of stitching together partial captures with minimal human intervention
A few people seem to be working on open source backlit line-scanners but as far as I know no central path forward has emerged. I hope someone figures it out.
As 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…
Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful. Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad fil…
That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it together relatively hands-free, even with it having lots of sky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful. Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad fil…
I see you mentioned using a 3D printer for scanning medium format film. I did something similar, but took the opposite approach. I placed the film on a lightbox and mounted that to the printer, then had that move around in front of a camera with macro lens. I did not have much of a problem with alignment. That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it…
I've been using a Coolscan 8000 and a 2007 iMac for 17 years (prior to that, I used a Mac Mini for a short while) and only last year had to replace the scanner motherboard after an international move. To continue to use Nikon's software, the iMac is still on 10.6 Snow Leopard. I shoot 35mm and medium format and the Coolscan pulls extraordinary detail from the negatives - vastly better than the best flatbed scanners I…
The ‘antiqueness’ and alleged difficulty of scanning with Nikon Coolscans is very overstated in this article. I’m using a Coolscan 9000 with a single adapter on an M3 Pro MacBook running Sequoia (latest MacOS). No exotic hardware needed whatsoever.