For archival purposes, I plan to scan old family black-and-white and color negatives as well as slides.
If I don’t require professional quality, what can I expect when using an iPhone 17 Pro in Pro RAW mode as a scanner? I expect the biggest problem will be when scanning color negatives.
What is the opinion of this community?
Will it work? Yes, kinda, probably?
Will it be good enough? That is only for you to decide. Test it to see if it meets your standards.
Most people here would advise towards other attainable options.
My semi-informed opinion: Originally, I got into film scanning because I wanted to preserve family images. I believe the quality of the iPhone camera’s lens and the size/format of it’s digital sensor is not optimized for anything close to this sort of project. You would be very much selling yourself and your other family members short on both the archival and sentimental value by recording family images this way.
To each their own but with a small budget and a little DIY skill you could use a camera/lens combo, or a flatbed scanner, or film strip scanner to likely achieve far, far greater results that are actually archival and printable should you so desire. With a larger budget you could pay someone else to do it nicely.
I’ve used iPhones to copy prints of A4 text pages and some postcards… That should work, provided you have good lighting. Not sure what you can get from a 135 or 126 negative or positive, not to mention 110 format or disk negatives.
Wondering if you already have an Iphone Pro 17? If so then perhaps you have already worked out a way to hold it over your film originals of whatever format you need to copy so that it is held at the correct distance and, crucially, so that is precisely aligned. With any setup simple practical considerations and perfect repeatable technique count for a lot even when you might have Apple Intelligence to help you along.
If you’ve already done all that then why not try photographing a piece of 36mm x 24mm graph paper, you can back illuminate it and even put it into a slide mount. If you’re going for smaller formats then try them as well. I suspect that it will show up some serious problems when compared with a simple inexpensive digital camera setup or flatbed scanner but you’re possibly in a position to find out and report back if you feel like it.
I guess you would be thinking of using the 100mm equivalent ‘48MP Fusion Telephoto’ camera to give you some distance from your film originals. As with all Iphone cameras since the Iphone 11 the main (best) camera has been ‘24mm equivalent’ and I would think that’s not going to be suitable.
I don’t have a 17, but experience with older phones.
Minimal focusing distance can be a problem and I’ve not found such info on Apple’s website. This does not matter though, optical physics are what they are and don’t depend on whether a Nikon or iPhone is used.
If you don’t already have an iPhone 17 Pro, I’d not get one for scanning’s sake. If you buy one anyways, you can try it and see what is possible…and post your findings here.
In general, you get better output with better input. With Phones, this means a lot of light and more than 8 bit (jpeg) output. As for holders, I’d check with Amazon or any other suitable shop/store.