Innovations in Camera Scanning - please add!

[SSelvidge]

There is a ton of innovation happening at all sorts of levels. EDIT 1: I HOPE OTHERS ADD TO THIS. There may be things that are from smaller producers/creators that we are unaware of!

EDIT 2: Additionally, what are some things advanced users would like to see being addressed?

I want/wish more of these folks to work together, some serious engineering (DIY or otherwise) is happening for all manner of issues we face. From small operators to larger companies. Interestingly the large established companies seem to be less interested in innovating for the consumer or even the lab market! Others are filling the voids. People are wanting more and more control and preciseness. That said, I understand if someone wants to turn it into businesses, rightfully so since there seems to be niche markets. I use some of the items below and have been interested in others (budgeting matters though!) This was inspired by @L0rdGwyn’s recent post: NLP Workflow Using Combined RGB Light Source Honestly, an IR layer becoming common and accessible would be a game changer, but the camera and lens requirements are steep.

Just off the top of my head at all sorts of price levels:
(and please add others as a resource!)

• I mean, obviously @nate’s NLP is an incredible tool. There are others but I keep coming back.

• Jackw01’s items, esp Big Light, seem so great, but who knows when more is available?! I know I am interested. RGB + IR is fantastic! Also he is doing great work helping people get some of this stuff more affordably instead of big markups on common items like the light enhancement sheets.

• @VladS Test Targets are a godsend. Well known to most of us regulars.

• Film-o-mat Autocarrier is an incredibly engineered device. Affordable (relatively speaking) if you need to cover high volumes precisely. White and White+IR capture options. Not flexible on film format for 35mm (no pano). Requires second device for 120 formats up to 6x7 (maybe 6x9). But still, wow.

• Tone Carrier is trying to get the whole package, seems great, also been awhile! Looking forward to more and more competition in the space.

• Lobster Holder is dead simple and smart for flatness. Cant believe no one had done it previously.

• We all know about Valoi and Negative Supply’s useful (if often pricey) products.

• Cinestill brought us a great little affordable light, all thing considered!

And many more!

[VladS]

Great post, Spencer! While I’ve also invested in this space—and even self-financed my photography hobby by selling targets—I find the situation somewhat awkward.

Despite all the sophistication brought by RGB and IR workflows, automated carriers, and conversion software, film scanning still demands significant money, time, and a non-trivial skill level to accomplish what is, in essence, a straightforward task. At an industrial level—think movie production—scanning is a purely mechanical afterthought, happening right next to film processing.

Looking at results from home-brew setups on photography forums, most are mediocre at best. The more convoluted the shoot-and-scan process, the more excited people seem to get, yet very few push far enough to achieve results where you no longer consciously register that an image was shot on film and scanned. When done right, grain, highlights, and shadow loss all look natural, like a properly exposed and printed photograph from the old days. Most home scans, however, clearly look “scanned,” which largely undermines the effort of shooting film at all.

That brings me to what feels like a missed opportunity: low-cost, kiosk-style, on-the-spot film scanning. Any big city should have places where you drop in, feed your film into a slot, and get high-quality scans quickly, with minimal fuss—laundromat-style. Film processing may be expensive due to lab overhead, which is why self-developing makes sense for many. But scanning is different: it should be quick and cheap.

Classic scanners were slow because of linear sensors and ancient data pipelines. Today’s two-dimensional sensors and computing power remove those constraints. The real challenge isn’t technology, but building durable, abuse-proof hardware with a simple, user-friendly interface. Such kiosks wouldn’t be cheap, but they could run 24/7, scale efficiently, and require minimal maintenance.

Home scanning rigs have become far more sophisticated than most people want or need, and many spend small fortunes just compensating for their flaws. Until a better alternative appears, the choice remains DIY struggles or handing the job to labs. As long as film photography is alive, I hope someone finally delivers a solution that works well enough for at least 90% of users.

[Digitizer]

Innovations … will probably be slow and remain niche. After all, the percentage of photos printed from film is small, compared to what is e.g. shot with smartphones. We’ll see progress mostly if someone engineers a solution that is both widely usable, easy to operate and affordable.

3D printing certainly helps prototyping but remains too slow or costly for production. Creating tools for large scale production - hold, large scale? Not to be expected…therefore tooling in HW is too expensive, as are solutions like Phase One’s Cultural Heritage offerings.

Probably, the best bet we have today is to try to get a working minilab for ease of use…and add some AI to reduce the effort of operations/image adjusting.

So, what shall we do? Our best, with the gear we have or are ready to get, knowing that out there, something exists that is better - and be happy with what we have and get.

[Harry]

I’m sure that we’ve all enjoyed getting to where we are with our own setups but if only I’d spent that time actually scanning/copying my negatives & slides! There’s definitely something obsessive about it, and yes, there’s always something better, it’s almost by definition about making the perfect the enemy of the good.

The main market must surely be for copying 35mm, it’s disappointing that Epson have called it a day on the V850 but it was quite a beast and not that good for 35mm. If only they had perservered with the F-3200, think what that could have become in the intervening 20 years or so.

SineBytes | Epson F-3200

[SSelvidge]

Very early on in my journey, one of the regulars, perhaps @Harry or @Digitizer or @Mark_Segal (but perhaps someone else?) said something that has stuck with me ever since… paraphrasing and dramatizing as I don’t recall exactly:

“You can always chase the dragon deeper into it’s lair.”

… there is no end to getting better at this whether it be technique, technology, hardware, software or patience and time dedicated to mastering what truly is it’s own craft - digitizing analog really well.

So, @Harry I totally agree! We all need to scan more while we are still here!

[Mark_Segal]

It was not me.

My sense of this undertaking is that there are two basic streams: people who send their film to service bureaux for digitizing, and people who are “DIYers”. Within the DIY stream, set-ups/gear splits into several streams depending on end-use. I like to think of rational selection from the end-use back, they key questions being (i) do you want to print, and (ii) if so, how big? That basically determines how much money you need to pour into resolution and megapixels. And it depends on who you are: an individual photographer, or a cultural heritage institution. if the latter you may be springing for 150 MP Phase-One set-up for about USD 65,000 minimum, or as one French institution is doing, the newest FUJI GFX 100 and accessories for about USD 10,000. Then there is the rest of us. Amongst this subset, we can spend less than US200 for Chinese attachments to a Canon Macro lens that will deliver about 50 lp/mm, or somewhat more for a similar set-up from Finland on a Leica delivering up to 64 lp/mm, or a copy-stand set-up with custom components that will add up to several thousand or more of which the lens will be both the costliest and most important component, but deliverable resolution could be much higher - well above 110 lp/mm. How many lp/mm you need at the capture stage depends on how many pixels and PPI you need at the print stage, which in turn depends on how big you want to print and/or how much waste you need for cropping. So as the old saying goes, “horses for courses”. These considerations are fundamental and outlive the latest turn of the screw in gadgetry.

[VladS]

I would slice and dice the situation as follows. If we look at prices, they reflect two major sides of the process: quality and throughput. The more expensive a rig is (beyond the first ~$500), the more stability it should offer. With stability comes ease of scanning large amounts of film, with time spent on refocusing and alignment dropping to nearly zero. Productivity increases noticeably. But how many people have that much film to scan?
The other side is quality. I think the one thing that really makes sense to chase is bit depth. A true 16-bit image will always contain enough data to withstand any mathematical manipulation—color space conversions, white balance, orange mask removal. highlight and shadow recovery, and the like. A sensor with real 16-bit output is always preferable and, unsurprisingly, comes at a cost. Better sensor like a phase one makes color conversion afterthought. So we are touching productivity again.

Resolution is a less important characteristic, and mainly becomes valuable when the sensor and film format differ significantly. If real grain is about 5 microns, you need roughly 100 lp/mm to resolve grain and the white space next to it. Achieving this requires very careful pixel-shift shooting, and a massive, expensive stand is essentially a must. But honestly, I don’t know why anyone needs to scan film at 100 lp/mm unless radical cropping is the goal or the whole artistic point is to show the dark and edgy side of the grain.
A good, flat-field lens is a must, but under $500 one can get an optically decent lens if one agrees that electronic coupling is not a priority—which it really isn’t if we accept that, once a system is tuned for a given film format, it’s better left untouched.
My point is that the difference between setups is simply productivity and quality. In this two-dimensional space, everybody finds their comfort zone. Given that many thousands of people rave about quality of their $200 Kodak Scanza, we here are the real losers—having failed to figure out a better way to kill time and RMD money.

[SSelvidge]

Absolutely, for most people good enough comes far sooner than they think it does! My post here was definitely aimed at the atypical users!

And a GFX is where I would love to end up … Cameras happen to the most costly items most of us cannot really DIY, the capture device and the lens. Though some people do come close!

[esun21]

Been thinking over this for a bit. A while ago I made my own automatic negative scanner similar to what that autocarrier does using an esp, a stepper motor, and a solenoid for the film locking. I also added a camera trigger using one of those classical 2.5 mm headphone jack things for my fuji camera. Currently uses just a white light, but toying with getting a deep ir-converted or full spectrum camera and a RGB+IR diode array. One challenge I realized after looking at my lenses was that the correct focus distance changes between the visible and ir wavelengths. You would need to first capture the R G and B channels at one focal distance, then refocus for the IR channel. Otherwise, your IR image would be significantly blurry and unusable. I think on film scanners with dICE, this focal difference is automatically compensated for by moving either the film or sensor plane. If the image sizes projected onto the sensor is off by a little between the visible and IR channels, i’m sure the image processing becomes much more difficult in a home-setting.

[SSelvidge]

Welcome to the forum! Love to hear about projects like this, because even when they are halted before finalization, learning happens. How did you do film transport - through the sprockets? Pressure on some sort of wheel?

I have a full spectrum camera for landscape, wildlife and astro work, but someday I’d love to test out its scanning abilities with an accessible hardware and software solution.

For the lens issue:
TLDR: Visible and IR light do not focus to the same plane in standard lenses; only lenses specifically designed for Vis/IR correction… typically true apochromatic (APO) or super-APO designs… can accurately focus both without shift.

Longer Visible-to-IR focus shift is real and unavoidable with conventional lens designs. The way around it is through specialized (often expensive) optics that are engineered to bring visible and near-IR wavelengths to the same focal plane. Many scanner lenses and high-end optics are designed this way. Lots of posts about these sorts of lenses here and other places.

Generally, these are APO or super-APO lenses, but often marketing can overstate and not all “APO” lenses are created equal. A true Vis/IR-corrected design requires intentional optical engineering, not just low chromatic aberration in the visible spectrum.

There are also many machine-vision lenses that meet these requirements and perform exceptionally well across Vis/IR, but they definitely require significant adaptation to use outside their intended systems.

[Harry]

Prompted by a post on the ‘Digitizing with a digital camera’ FB forum. This won’t happen but I’d like a basic slim lightweight flatbed scanner with a 12”x10” scanning area and a modest resolution to scan clear filing sheets in all formats. For contact sheets of course, which otherwise are a bit of a pain in the new digital darkroom and have somewhat fallen by the wayside.

[SSelvidge]

That would be nice! As a part-time archivist, I would LOVE a sheet feed solution that could scan negs and slides in pages en masse for new digital contact sheets. Boy would that make my life easier.

I am in the process of setting up a Ricoh duplex document scanner to scan original contact sheets on photo paper with images on the front and info written on the back, sometimes with 2-5 more images taped on the back, too.

To make new contact sheets, I use a cheap 12x16 inch (30x42 cm) light panel with a piece of plexi and a gaff tape hinge under my copy station. I raise the camera a bit, toss on my 35mm to fill the frame to get nice contact sheets.

Are they perfect? No. But how often were contact sheets of images made in varying conditions ever perfect! At least now its a raw file that I can push around to see what I need to see!

[bags]

Thanks so much for starting this thread!!!

Huge shout out for the Lobster Holder. I’ve used a lot of other gear, but this one turns out to be the best, simplest, and still cheap (not always an obvious combo).

For scanning, I use a Beseler enlarger. They are rock solid and used ones are reasonable.

I go back and forth on whether to stay with my Panasonic S1R (bought cheaply used) paired with the Sigma 105 macro. Always thinking of more pixels, like the Sigma fp-l. But it’s such a minor increase at a significant cost. And, since I scan mainly MF (6x6) and sometimes 135, the extra resolution isn’t going to result in anything I can see.

And huge shout out to Vlad! I never start a session without using his high frequency negatives.

[Harry]

Just in case you hadn’t seen it, Spencer also uses a Panasonic S1R (and a Beseler enlarger), very interesting tests of pixel-shift here:

Pixel Shift vs Regular Capture - quick comparison w S1R

Thought this should be its own thread. EDIT later: Post 2 and especially post 15 in this thread have more thorough personal analysis from me and serious explanations from another author, respectively. Digital camera: Panasonic Lumix S1R - f6.9, 1/60th, ISO 100, Sigma 70mm ART. Holders and Stand: Film in a Valoi 360 with their CS_Lite and light enhancing sheets. All on a Besseler 23C XL III enlarger turned into a copy stand. Took 4-5 tries for optimal focus and alignment (I was trying to be pa…

[SSelvidge]

Absolutely, I just love all the innovation! And the lobster holder just makes sense to me though I don’t own one (owned other products when it was released!)

And I also use the S1R + Beseler 23C XL III + Sigma Art 105mm as my main kit for 35mm and Sigma 150mm APO DG OS for slides in my machine. Do you use the pixel shift at all? For the $ it was the easiest way to get higher resolution when I (rarely) need it without MANY extra steps in my high volume environment. I have read a facebook post in a related group that Andrew Bruce made that he used our exact camera/lens combo and didn’t love it, but he was doing it from a museum/cultural heritage POV. I still want to learn how to measure MTF and Sampling Efficiency because of this post but have not yet done so. 99% of the time I stick to regular single capture.

I have some new targets on the way from @VladS and I want to test my small fleet of lenses I have collected over the years on the same HQ target:
-EF 100L, -EF Sigma 70 Art and 150 APO DG, -L-mount Sigma 105 Art, -Nikon Coolscan 8000 105 f2.9 lens on bellows with L and EF mounts, -and Tominon 50mm f4.5. Then the best one, if obvious, will retry my pixelshift test. I still imagine its utility will be limited but it will be fun.

[bags]

Thanks, I’ll look into this more. The early tests I saw (confirmed by my own, admitted brief, exploration of pixel shifting) dissuaded me from using it. I just didn’t see enough of a difference. I’ve been tempted by the Sony 61 mps cameras with pixel-shifting, but it’s nuts to spend that much. I could probably buy a drum scanner instead….

I’m completely guilty of the following. We prefer film because it’s “analogue.” (Maybe a dumb descriptor, but it’s a nice contrast to “digital.) And yet, we go all the way down the digital scanning rabbit hole, trying to squeeze every last element out of film. Maybe we should all just buy Hasselblad X2Dii’s and process their pictures with preferred film simulators.

[VladS]

I agree completely, I can imagine true artists out there who could use film today in very creative and truly “photographic” way. I do believe there might be 10% of all today’s film shooters who really produce images impossible to get via any digital means ( and that includes MF and LF shooters). But having majority of folks to shoot 35 mm film and then mechanically convert it to digital just so they have a proof-of-work is beyond me. Of course those who scan archives have all my respect and I am happy to help. On the other hand i understand that MF and LF photographers still cannot switch to digital because no sensor still matches the size of 6x6 or larger format and aesthetics of larger format cannot be achieved if media size is inadequate. That’s life. So if someone shoots 35 mm today I simply hope this is a stepping stone to get in MF world once they have developed their chops. Otherwise I am afraid it’s just fad and nothing more

[ArnoG]

During the past couple of years of trying to scan and a couple of iterations with rigs, I did a number of “discoveries” and “innovations”, but they’re spread out across these helpful forums, so I’ll shortly summarize my few (four) cents here so perhaps for others they can be useful. I am stable now(…), I no longer dig for further improvements, and just scan, being fully satisfied with my process and results.

1. Resolution: The sobering realization that no matter what we do, we will never be able to digitize what (even 35mm) film can provide in terms of resolution. See the extensive tests of Henning Serger in multiple places in this thread:

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/rollei-rpx-25-grain-and-resolution.115244/page-2

Most film easily achieves >100 lp/mm, Adox HR50 does something like 285 lp/mm while CMS20 does a silly 800 lp/mm or so. Try that with any scanner or digital camera. However, after printing my own (“only”) 24MP 35mm scans (of Kodak double x) at A3 size and concluding that the prints are too sharp for female portraits, I see no need (for me) to move to MF or more than 24-36MP.

2. Lenses: The realization that purpose-designed dedicated scanner lenses easily beat most, if not all, multi-purpose lenses (https://www.arnogodeke.com/Blog/Using-a-scanner-lens-for-DSLR-scanning)

3. Homogeneous light: Basic physics (well, perhaps not so basic to calculate) dictates that a finite planar light source will always have light fall-off towards the edges (https://www.arnogodeke.com/Blog/Homogeneity-of-planar-light-sources-for-film-scanning). I have posted this on multiple places in the forums here, but see that many here still struggle with the effects of inhomogeneity in their light source, while it is an inevitable fact of physics that is easily corrected with a simple luminosity mask during import in software, which is how I address it.

4. Color: The realization that color negative film is basically a 3-bit, discrete C, Y, M storage container of color information that needs to be probed with a 3-bit discrete R, G, B light source, because of the discrete 3-bit sensitivity of optical color printing paper that film is designed for (https://www.arnogodeke.com/Blog/Trichromatic-light). Hence, a trichromatic light source is needed to accurately probe the color information that is stored in color negative film, while slides are designed to be projected with a continuous spectrum tungsten light, and should be scanned that way. My trichromatic source enables me further to fully negate the orange mask, removing any need to set a white point before inversion, or making non-linear changes to the color balance during inversion. Here’s how negating the orange mask in hardware with a trichromatic light looks like:

[SamA]

100%. More if possible. In all the many convoluted “home scan recipe” journeys I’ve only ever been trying to do one thing. And that’s a good “true to the film” digital ingest of what I shot on the roll. And everything in consumer scan land used to fight you on that one. They always did auto-white balance on frame by frame level and auto-levels (which were always so eager on max dynamic range that clipping was always included and things like cloudscapes turned into hideous grain-scapes). And I used to sigh to look at the page of, well, any 90s magazine to see what could be achieved with professional equipment and workflows. And, as you say, scanning for cinema has all this time seemed a sort of “solved problem” but somehow none of this SW or HW or even workflow available for stills.

The problem I see is that if you made these “kiosks” they would be just like the old ones. I don’t mean the tech, which would obviously benefit from a lot of progress. I mean the intent. The old photo kiosks and the new ones would be doing just what the scan software all does: trying to make every photo look “great” however far off it is on the film. With auto-everything and jacked levels and clipping plus too much sharpening (and probably too much NR to boot). Why? Because if you target the mass market that’s what will be demanded.

But we can dream, right? Honestly, what I’d really love is my old Coolscan 9000ED but with a modern camera sensor on the back end and I can get the RAWs out. That, to be honest, would do me. Especially if the ICE still worked.

Sam