Recently I have purchased a Valoi 35mm holder. I decided to do this as although I have the Skier Copybox II, I was suffering from darkening at the edge of the image once it was converted, part of the reason for this is that I add a custom border to the skier to further reduce the available space so there was max 1-2 mm from the image edge and the negative holder border - emphasis therefore that this is not a comparison to a stock Skier holder!! I did remove the custom border subsequently on the Skier holder and saw an improvement, however lightening around the edge of the image was still noticeable.
On the test images attached the Custom skier holder is on the left, Valoi 35mm holder is on the right.
The Valoi has a bevelled edge so that supposedly no light is reflected from the holder back to the negative. You can see a significant improvement from the Skier to the Valoi setup, however, notice in extreme cases (such as the negatives attached, where the negative is dark - i.e. an image with dominantly sky) that such darkening still appears visible. In 95% of images you will not notice such effects. The are other possible reasons why this may have happened - I’m using the Skier light and Fuji XT2 with Nikkor AI macro, but I am interested to know what solutions people have developed for dealing with this?
What film carriers don’t darken the edges of the negative during scanning (resulting in lightening upon conversion)? Valoi seems the best so far, I have heard that the EFH suffers similarly to the Skier in this respect. How does Negative Supply holder fair?
You can also see the effect of the underlying Skier light source on the third image (lines).
All the images have the exact same conversion in NLP, the source negative was photographed using similar settings (F8, ISO200, 2/3 of a stop overexposed).
