Ces1um
Member
So I've recently pulled my film cameras out of hiding after several years and in an effort to save about $12/roll I've gone back to scanning my own film (spoiler alert, that decision has cost me thousands of dollars). It's been a rocky road. I have an epson v600 photo flatbed scanner which is what I've used in the past with good results. I just hate that scanner though. I hate the workflow. I hate cutting negatives to fit the scanning masks/transparency unit. I hate how long it takes. I like the results though. My issue is my old iMac had died and in an effort to save money and not buy another computer I tried out a Kodak Slide and Scan (5") and the lomography Digitaliza max.
The slide and scan first appealed to me because it didn't require cutting the negatives, was a small, conveniently sized unit that could be stored anywhere, and it offered a fantastic workflow. My experience using it was that the buttons are clunky to use, not overly intuitive, and the scans produced mixed results. Sometimes the colours rendered beautifully- better than inverting curves in third party software. Sometimes they were radically off. If you could navigate the button presses you could almost always improve the colours however. There was no need for cropping, no need to invert curves, and it was very easy on the head. The result were....ok. 110 film scans impressively well. I think the scanner is well suited for the lower resolution photos of 110 film. 35mm scans however are just ok. Film grain gets turned into film puddles. The scanner certainly doesn't outperform the potential of 35mm film. But this way is easy and negatives don't get scratched up. You can't scan 120 film with this scanner. For 110 film from now on this is my go-to scanner from now on.
The Lomography digitaliza max likely will sit in a drawer forever. I will play with it to see if I can get it to work better, but I don't like it. Here's why.
Scans taken with my iPhone 15 exhibit a very strong blue colour cast after inverting curves. I have not found a way to teach the camera app to use a custom white balance which would help combat some of this. Using either Lomography's digitaliza online lab tool on the phone, will invert colours fine but any other touch ups will result in an instantly far more grainy photo than the original source file. Strangely enough using this same browser based software on a computer does not yield such results. But here's the thing. Inverting curves doesn't work. There- I've said it. It gets you close but someone needs to figure out for each film stock what the actual inversion curves need to look like because just simply flipping them yields awful results. I know many of you out there are great at doing this. I'm not. Lightroom for mobile didn't do much better (no extra grain though). OM systems OM workspace also didn't do a great job of turning a negative into a positive. I also tried google's snapseed app- similar results. I don't think it's the hardware though. It's all software issues at this point.
I also tried using the digitaliza with a tripod, camera and macro lens. Getting the digitaliza under the tripod, lining up the shot is fussy. There is not a lot of room under the tripod to move this beast around. It can be done, but it's clunky. 35mm film is easier to scan this way. Using Lomography's recently released 110 film adapter is an awful user experience. One opens the a hinged door, places what feels to be a cardboard scanning mask down with no way to secure it, and then the film is placed on top of this. After this you close the hinge. Then the troubles start. The hinged door snaps tightly onto the film making it harder to advance the film within the holder. Also that scanning mask moves around so it doesn't always line up correctly. It's a poorly thought out system that results in scratched negatives and additional cropping required. I'll keep playing with it, but I don't like it. At least with this setup you can set a custom white balance (my camera thinks it's 7400k) and the blue colour cast is nowhere as noticeable. I still don't like how inverting the curves renders colours though.
So back to the scanner. I bought a newly released windows surface laptop and installed the driver, which installed without a hitch. Except it didn't. The software did its thing but the computer fails to recognize the scanner. Device manager does not see any driver installed for the device despite the installer enthusiastically saying it's been installed successfully. It's possible the surface with its new arm chip isn't actually supported at all. My son then tried installing it on his older laptop. The installer worked fine, but again, no device found. After the installation software ran he then had to go into settings and "add a scanner" in the add new device settings area. No installer should be this poorly designed. I returned my surface and bought a MacBook Pro. It found the scanner without issue and I was happy to see my scanner still functioned. 35mm scans easily. I get great resolution. The colours look wonderful and the scanner inverts them for me. The 35mm workflow isn't as bad as I remember. I still hate cutting negatives though. I don't have a 110 scanning mask for my scanner though so I pop in my 110 film into the 35mm mask and tape it down on either side, or simply pinch the film in the holder when it snaps closed. I lose a frame to scratches doing this. I don't recommend it. Everything scans just as well this way but there is a problem. Epson's software doesn't allow you to enlarge the preview scan so you can set your scan areas. I'm 51 and being able to reliably see the edges of these tiny photographs and use a marquee tool to delineate them means I don't get a proper crop around the edge. I lose image area or I overscan the photo meaning more cropping and editing later. Strangely enough the Command + shortcut does not enlarge the screen so that accessibility setting isn't working for some reason. Using the scanner for 110 film is just too cumbersome. The improvements in resolution and colour don't justify the extra work and the Kodak slide and scan will be my method of choice for the future. I wonder if epson will ever put out a 110 scanning mask/tray for the epson v600.... Lomography has a 110 scanning mask which I do not own. I'd be interested in what others thought of it but I doubt I will invest in one myself.
I'm not sure if what I've written will be helpful to anyone. It may be more of a rant on my end than constructive help to the reader. But I'm betting somewhere out there is someone buying a 110 camera and trying to figure out what will be the easiest way to get a decent digital image from their negative and maybe they'll stumble across this long winded and frustrating adventure of mine.
There are times I think that technology of an era is meant only to work with other technology of that era. Maybe film should be optically printed to paper only. Maybe digital photos should be displayed on high resolution, high nit value screens rather than worrying about colour profiles, colour spaces, paper colour and print quality. Maybe scanning film is a form of masochism. I haven't tried printing digital negatives for later use in optical printing, but I imagine there are hideous issues with that as well. Sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself. Why do I constantly have the urge to buy a 4x5 pinhole camera and develop the film myself again? Why do I want to go back and scan that negative, using two passes and stitch the results together just to make a single 4x5 image I could do far more easily with a digital camera and a pinhole lens? There has to be something wrong with me....
The slide and scan first appealed to me because it didn't require cutting the negatives, was a small, conveniently sized unit that could be stored anywhere, and it offered a fantastic workflow. My experience using it was that the buttons are clunky to use, not overly intuitive, and the scans produced mixed results. Sometimes the colours rendered beautifully- better than inverting curves in third party software. Sometimes they were radically off. If you could navigate the button presses you could almost always improve the colours however. There was no need for cropping, no need to invert curves, and it was very easy on the head. The result were....ok. 110 film scans impressively well. I think the scanner is well suited for the lower resolution photos of 110 film. 35mm scans however are just ok. Film grain gets turned into film puddles. The scanner certainly doesn't outperform the potential of 35mm film. But this way is easy and negatives don't get scratched up. You can't scan 120 film with this scanner. For 110 film from now on this is my go-to scanner from now on.
The Lomography digitaliza max likely will sit in a drawer forever. I will play with it to see if I can get it to work better, but I don't like it. Here's why.
Scans taken with my iPhone 15 exhibit a very strong blue colour cast after inverting curves. I have not found a way to teach the camera app to use a custom white balance which would help combat some of this. Using either Lomography's digitaliza online lab tool on the phone, will invert colours fine but any other touch ups will result in an instantly far more grainy photo than the original source file. Strangely enough using this same browser based software on a computer does not yield such results. But here's the thing. Inverting curves doesn't work. There- I've said it. It gets you close but someone needs to figure out for each film stock what the actual inversion curves need to look like because just simply flipping them yields awful results. I know many of you out there are great at doing this. I'm not. Lightroom for mobile didn't do much better (no extra grain though). OM systems OM workspace also didn't do a great job of turning a negative into a positive. I also tried google's snapseed app- similar results. I don't think it's the hardware though. It's all software issues at this point.
I also tried using the digitaliza with a tripod, camera and macro lens. Getting the digitaliza under the tripod, lining up the shot is fussy. There is not a lot of room under the tripod to move this beast around. It can be done, but it's clunky. 35mm film is easier to scan this way. Using Lomography's recently released 110 film adapter is an awful user experience. One opens the a hinged door, places what feels to be a cardboard scanning mask down with no way to secure it, and then the film is placed on top of this. After this you close the hinge. Then the troubles start. The hinged door snaps tightly onto the film making it harder to advance the film within the holder. Also that scanning mask moves around so it doesn't always line up correctly. It's a poorly thought out system that results in scratched negatives and additional cropping required. I'll keep playing with it, but I don't like it. At least with this setup you can set a custom white balance (my camera thinks it's 7400k) and the blue colour cast is nowhere as noticeable. I still don't like how inverting the curves renders colours though.
So back to the scanner. I bought a newly released windows surface laptop and installed the driver, which installed without a hitch. Except it didn't. The software did its thing but the computer fails to recognize the scanner. Device manager does not see any driver installed for the device despite the installer enthusiastically saying it's been installed successfully. It's possible the surface with its new arm chip isn't actually supported at all. My son then tried installing it on his older laptop. The installer worked fine, but again, no device found. After the installation software ran he then had to go into settings and "add a scanner" in the add new device settings area. No installer should be this poorly designed. I returned my surface and bought a MacBook Pro. It found the scanner without issue and I was happy to see my scanner still functioned. 35mm scans easily. I get great resolution. The colours look wonderful and the scanner inverts them for me. The 35mm workflow isn't as bad as I remember. I still hate cutting negatives though. I don't have a 110 scanning mask for my scanner though so I pop in my 110 film into the 35mm mask and tape it down on either side, or simply pinch the film in the holder when it snaps closed. I lose a frame to scratches doing this. I don't recommend it. Everything scans just as well this way but there is a problem. Epson's software doesn't allow you to enlarge the preview scan so you can set your scan areas. I'm 51 and being able to reliably see the edges of these tiny photographs and use a marquee tool to delineate them means I don't get a proper crop around the edge. I lose image area or I overscan the photo meaning more cropping and editing later. Strangely enough the Command + shortcut does not enlarge the screen so that accessibility setting isn't working for some reason. Using the scanner for 110 film is just too cumbersome. The improvements in resolution and colour don't justify the extra work and the Kodak slide and scan will be my method of choice for the future. I wonder if epson will ever put out a 110 scanning mask/tray for the epson v600.... Lomography has a 110 scanning mask which I do not own. I'd be interested in what others thought of it but I doubt I will invest in one myself.
I'm not sure if what I've written will be helpful to anyone. It may be more of a rant on my end than constructive help to the reader. But I'm betting somewhere out there is someone buying a 110 camera and trying to figure out what will be the easiest way to get a decent digital image from their negative and maybe they'll stumble across this long winded and frustrating adventure of mine.
There are times I think that technology of an era is meant only to work with other technology of that era. Maybe film should be optically printed to paper only. Maybe digital photos should be displayed on high resolution, high nit value screens rather than worrying about colour profiles, colour spaces, paper colour and print quality. Maybe scanning film is a form of masochism. I haven't tried printing digital negatives for later use in optical printing, but I imagine there are hideous issues with that as well. Sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself. Why do I constantly have the urge to buy a 4x5 pinhole camera and develop the film myself again? Why do I want to go back and scan that negative, using two passes and stitch the results together just to make a single 4x5 image I could do far more easily with a digital camera and a pinhole lens? There has to be something wrong with me....