Soke Engineering / Knokke film scanner

[brbo]

Where does the idea that this scanner uses a 1:1 lens come from?

Georg clearly said that they are using a small sensor - much smaller than FF. This is also evident from product images. A 1:1 lens would necessarily mean that there would need to be some stitching if you want to scan 135 film. Product images certainly don't support that idea as lens and sensor board seem definitely fixed and I really can't imagine anyone designing a scanner like this that moves the film up and down to scan all the different parts of the frame.

What am I missing?!

 

[koraks]

Where does the idea that this scanner uses a 1:1 lens come from?

I agree that assumption doesn't add up; you're right.

 

[brbo]

Btw, lens in Minolta 5400 desktop scanner is a 8/4 design (magnification 1.8x), Nikon CS 5000 uses a 7/4 lens.

 

[albireo]

PS: I think it's also safe to assume that the choice has been for a CMOS image sensor with onboard ADC's since the electronics design and signal handling of doing that off-chip on a custom board would be akin to rocket science. No disrespect to the developers here, but that's a different league of EE.

Thanks @koraks - that helps a lot.

and thanks @gswdh and team. Never been interested in the whole DSLR scanning cottage industry but I'm incredibly interested in this project. It might be the replacement I need for when my Coolscan breaks.

Keep us posted!

 

[_T_]

Where does the idea that this scanner uses a 1:1 lens come from?

Georg clearly said that they are using a small sensor - much smaller than FF. This is also evident from product images. A 1:1 lens would necessarily mean that there would need to be some stitching if you want to scan 135 film. Product images certainly don't support that idea as lens and sensor board seem definitely fixed and I really can't imagine anyone designing a scanner like this that moves the film up and down to scan all the different parts of the frame.

What am I missing?!

I was not saying that the scanner uses a 1:1 lens. Only that near 1:1 a symmetrical lens automatically cancels much of the distortion you would otherwise have to correct for.

The actual magnification could be significantly less or significantly more and still show much of the cancellation provided by this type of design.

1:2 magnification or even 1:3 magnification are usually still within that range of being considered near 1:1 or near macro.

 

[photoyoda]

Hoping for the best on this one, but if its yet another consumer scanner that can't meet the standard of a 20+ year old consumer scanner (Coolscan 5000, or 4000/V even) outside of speed, it'd be a pretty big bummer.

Am I correct in understanding it at least has a narrowband RGB light source (though unfortunately not paired with a mono sensor)?

 

[photoyoda]

Of course! I've been a long time lurker from way back in the APUG days. In fact I arrived here because an extremely generous person (who I can't remember the name of) gifted me an Nikon F3 on the condition of a token donation to APUG when I was a poor student around 12 years ago.

Yes we get a lot of requests for scans but I'm just not 100% happy with them yet although some do exist on the internet out there however you wouldn't know which ones. I'm finding the feedback on Instagram overwhelming positive but also extremely quick to criticise so posting something a little sub par with the promise of getting better in the future wouldn't do a lot of good I don't think. Scans should be availble in the next couple of weeks, tho. Almost everything is working great but we've had some troubles with some Chinese suppliers and a design engineer setting everything back a couple of months.

I think I might start a new thread considering how much has changed. I will open one with some scans .

Any update on those scans...?

 

[250swb]

With release announced for Q2 2026 I'd have thought they'd be making more fuss about it by now?