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 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.
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 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.
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 together relatively hands-free, even with it having lots of sky.
I've been doing something similar. I started with a 3D printer approach, then two cheap aliexpress C-beam linear actuators and finally managed to acquire a 2-axis microscope stage for cheap. The key I have found is that any issues with alignment can actually be solved with focus-stitching.
The real problem with most scanning setups is actually getting accurate color out of color negatives. The common wisdom these days is to use high-CRI light, but I believe that approach is flawed. Film scanning is not an imaging challenge, but a rather a densitometric one. You don't actually want to take a photo of the negative in a broad spectrum because the dyes in photo negatives were never intended to be used in a broad-spectrum context. You actually need to sample the density of the dye layers at very specific wavelengths determined by a densitometric standard (status M) that was designed specifically for color negative film. Doing this with a standard digital camera with a bayer sensor is... non trivial and requires characterizing the sensor response in a variety of ways.
Basically the hardware is easy, the software is hard.
Wow, do you have a write up of your scanning setup? It sounds like it could work for scanning 4x5 and 8x10.
I’m also curious about your comments on the light source. Although you’re 100% correct about the way the wavelengths are specified in the data sheets, the reality has always been different. When I was printing color in the darkroom, our enlargers were very basic lights with subtractive color filters. Dedicated film scanners used either fluorescent or basic LED backlights. Have you run into color reproduction trouble that you’re sure relates to the illuminant or sensor response curves?
I used an A7C2 + Sony FE 50mm f2.8 macro. The lightbox was a custom build based on the design that I found linked on HN recently: https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/. This was then mounted vertically on the toolhead of my 3D printer with the camera on a tripod, I then used the Z and X axes to scan across the negative.
Although I had success with PTGui and it "just worked", I didn't fancy paying for it and instead used Hugin in the end. This lead me to take around 63 pictures with 50% overlap.
The film was a 4x5 negative and after stitching I'd say the effective DPI was ~4500
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...
B&Ws also scan poorly on it if the negatives are even a little bit dense. Tricky negatives that could still produce good images in the darkroom had no hope on the LS-2000.
You seem knowledgeable in this space. I’ve researched scanners for only scanning old prints but get mixed messages. What would be your advice on a scanner for this purpose to get 90% good enough… epson 650/700?
Yep! Just card stock. For some reason having a white backing behind the image causes worse scans when the bright light can penetrate the image you're scanning and gets reflected internally off that white sheet. I always just put a thin piece of black cardstock on top of everything I scanned.
The other nice thing about the higher end Coolscan would have been the relative triviality of hooking up a FireWire peripheral to that Mac mini M4 shown in the pictures, or even USB with the midrange LS-5000.
Thank you very much for all those informations. I kind of agree. It's a nice retrocomputing adventure but that doesn't seem that efficient. But eh, we know process is very important for us film shooters, so if he enjoys, it's mission complete to me. I used to painfully scan bw negatives with Epson flat scanner 15 years ago and the experience was awful. I just bought an EASY35 from Valoi to dig backinto my films with a 70mm Macro from SIGMA on Lumix S5. So far it's very impressive. Focusing straight on the grain is a dream. Is it the setup you use now ?
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.
My current Vuescan license is from 1999. And I think that one was just to replace an older serial due to some upgrade on their end. It's probably the most bang for the buck of any software I've actually purchased.
I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well.
Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.
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've ever used.
I also run a Nikon Coolscan and Epson 750 Pro on my Windows 11 machine. I also shoot slides using my Sony A7RIII with appropriate lighting and mounts. The Coolscan consistently gives me the best results.
These "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...
Nice setup. $50 for a used LS-2000 is a steal! I used the Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II for many years until it broke down, at which point I could not afford a replacement. I stopped shooting with film almost 15 years ago but for a long time had my eyes on a used Coolscan 4000 for those eventual few moments where I found a forgotten slide or strip of film I hadn't scanned, but eventually settled with the Reflecta CrystalScan 7200. Though it's not quite as good I find it an entirely acceptable film scanner on a budget.
I can’t contribute on that exact setup since I only used windows xp / usb film scanner for a similar but much less dpi setup but setting up a vintage Mac OS 9 system is not that hard. The hardware an iMac g3/g4 are still accessible and cheap enough on eBay and you can make them more reliable. A laptop also makes it easier out of the box. Emulation also works.
SCSI isn’t scary. It wasn’t scary in 2006 and it shouldn’t be scary today.
I share the same age as this writer, if not very close since the life events are similar e.g. high school in mid 00s. I find having a dark room and using proper technique and developer, or even Lightroom processing 10-50x more complicated then running a vintage Mac OS 9 or diving into scsi hardware.
It should not deter anyone and it had the same languish by people in the same time period.
After all these years I think manually mapping IRQs or having pop the side of the case off to move jumpers around for IRQs to be more challenging. I’m just surprised to read that SCSI is annoying. I wonder when I’ll be reading similar Context about using IDE drives or serial ports (okay baud rate issues can be annoying).
By all means not to be negative, article is excellent. I just see it as a trope: “scsi is hard”
I'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 switch to cheap CIS sensors since quality no longer matters.
Outside of expensive specialized scanners, the Epson V600 is pretty much the only scanner in production still using a CCD sensor and it came out in 2009. It has nearly doubled in price over its lifetime to $350 due to lack of competition and I presume inflation. It is the de facto scanner used in the trading card world because of the output quality and ability to create templates within the software (I 3D printed my own brackets to be able to scan/crop 4 cards at a time perfectly every time). But last I checked MacOS support is pretty much gone and even Windows is barely tolerable. Its days are probably numbered, too.
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.
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.
I don't really shoot film for the away-from-the-computer experience. Nobody is going to come over to my apartment to view my photos, and I'm not going to carry them around to show people.
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.
Yeah, if resolution is your thing, then you have unfortunately little option without spending proper money for medium format digital. It's worth it though, if you find yourself with the budget for a phase one or a fuji system!
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.
Likewise, I run my Nikon Coolscan on my Windows 11 machine with no special adapters. Works better than my Epson 750 Pro and Sony A7RIII with the right lenses, mounts, and lighting.
Yeah I did this for a DV cam and needed two adapters: USB C to the old DisplayPort form of Thunderbolt, and then that to Firewire. And even that wasn't complete, because I needed to adapt to the smaller Firewire port on the camera.
Obviously they could make a single stage adapter but I didn't find it if it exists.
Linux scanner support is amazing. I have a >10 year old printer/scanner/fax machine that I still use for scanning and faxing sometimes. Getting scanning to work in modern MacOS or Windows is ... an adventure. It's possible! But an adventure for sure.
I was delighted when I opened the scanner tool in fedora/gnome for laughs and it showed the (networked) machine as a scanning source. And I selected it. AND IT WORKED. I never even had to set it up!
In general, if there aren't Image Capture drivers, then older, largely 32-bit scan software won't work on Catalina or newer. It's kind of a gamble, and you sometimes have to manually run the device file from the image capture directory to get it to properly load the driver.
I remember the only challenge getting my TMA flatbed scanner working with Ubuntu Studio in 2010 was downloading an extra xsane package.
I've heard great things about drum scanners (and seem some amazing comparisons). I'm hoping to send some of my medium format film to get a 100MP-level scan.
Amusingly enough, I found that my B&W Ilford film shots (on all three different film types I tried) have way less detail (or "resolution") than standard iso400 Kodak color film.
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.
I am looking at his DSLR vs scanner pictures and I cannot believe my eyes. Do DSLR "scans" of film really look that bad or the author has done a suboptimal scan with the camera?
Yea this is definitely a setup issue. Everything looks soft in his DSLR scans, probably an issue with the depth of field. I used to DSLR-scan 6x8 medium format and while it was a major PITA the results were phenomenal [1,2]. With stitching and a high enough magnification you can easily pull up to 800 Megapixels or more out of medium format frames. Without a 1:1 magnification (while the lens was able to magnify 1:1, my setup wasn't able to accomodate the focus distance adequately so I was more in the ballpark of 1:1.8 or 1:2) I was able to stitch frames into 300+ Megapixel images with about 16 or 20 individual images making up the mosaic.
The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time.
If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you.
Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size.
1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...
> albeit files are slightly overly compressed
I agree, pretty sure the host upload is at fault here.
> What light source did you use
A simple LED strip light, you know those flexible ones. They were glued on the inside (just the bottom panel) of an aluminium box 30x40x8cm and then a frosted acrylic panel was placed on top. While the light color is not that important I chose a neutral white. But I reference each scan images white balance from a reference image of the light table so it gets compensated anyway. Worked like a charm when I still shot analog. Gone digital now unfortunately as the costs just rose too quickly as a college student. Still miss my Fuji GX680 sometimes, but I'm also really happy with my Fuji X-Pro 2.
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...
Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 in the UK. A lot of the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too.
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
I shoot cheap color film (and have for almost 20 years) because I like the conspicuous grain pattern. Likewise I shoot quite a bit of 5222 which I develop in rodinal.
Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.
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.