What are 2024 best scanning solutions for XPAN users ?

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and this is my firs thread. I'm living in Paris, France and passionnate photographer for many years. I'm mainly using my XPAN with 45, 30 lenses.

The questions has probably been raised frequently but Im looking for 2024 best scanning solutions for xpan, user experiences and result examples.

I'm curently using a V600 wich delivers decent results but not as good as what I'm looking for. I was previously using a Nikon LS IV but it is getting old and cannot scan a 24x65 one shot.

I was considering a Plustek OpicFilm 120 Pro butt seems still unavailable. I can go fro a 35mm"only" scanner but any insight would be welcome.

For instance what about the Plustek 135i which is capable of scanning 24x65 ? Other scanner solution ? Quality scan is really the mainpoint here.

I'd like to avoid anotther flatbed or Digital cam reproduction technic.

Many thanks in advance.

Drum scans or Imacon scans still give the highest quality. Nikon Coolscan 8000 or 9000 with the right adapter are great as well.

Thanks Richard. I think we are all ok with this statement. I must add that my ask is more on market availbale (new) equipements. Thanks

Hmmm... in that case, you really don't have many options other than dSLR based. Not many new scanners are being made

The Nikon 8000ED and 9000ED can scan xpan negs with the rotating glass carrier. It comes with a mask for xpan negs.

I don't think any new scanners can handle them, though. I don't have an Xpan, but I have a Russian Horizon panoramic camera that gives similar-sized negs and I have been getting them scanned by Gelatin Labs. They use a Noritsu HS-1800 scanner, which can scan Xpan and other pano negs if the lab has the holders for them. You might try them, or look for another lab that uses the Noritsu scanner and has the carrier for it.

Welcome to Photrio, @Cylou !

To the list of options already given, I'd add a decent flatbed scanner as a relatively affordable way of scanning this format. Epson scanners with transparency adapters are sometimes available for an attractive price on the second hand market, and they're also still being sold new if you don't mind paying a little extra. You won't get quite the same resolution as with a dedicated film scanner, but unless you're making very large prints from your scans, the results can be perfectly adequate (or even, quite good, actually).

Thanks for your answers. Does anyone has example/experience of the plustek 135i xpan scan ?

Scan & stitch?

Another XPan user! Fantastic. My technique was to scan two halves of the XPan negative in a Plustek 35mm film scanner and merge the two sections. It is clumsy but works well:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2022/07/hasselblad-xpan-panoramic-camera-how-to.html?m=1

Old school style...still working but not optimized ;o)

Cylou said:

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and this is my firs thread. I'm living in Paris, France and passionnate photographer for many years. I'm mainly using my XPAN with 45, 30 lenses.

The questions has probably been raised frequently but Im looking for 2024 best scanning solutions for xpan, user experiences and result examples.

I'm curently using a V600 wich delivers decent results but not as good as what I'm looking for. I was previously using a Nikon LS IV but it is getting old and cannot scan a 24x65 one shot.

I was considering a Plustek OpicFilm 120 Pro butt seems still unavailable. I can go fro a 35mm"only" scanner but any insight would be welcome.

For instance what about the Plustek 135i which is capable of scanning 24x65 ? Other scanner solution ? Quality scan is really the mainpoint here.

I'd like to avoid anotther flatbed or Digital cam reproduction technic.

Many thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

So here is a workflow I figured out two years ago. It exploits the SA-30 holder of Nikon Coolscan 5000ED to scan a whole roll of Xpan negatives in a batch, with minimal user intervention. It does two passes to scan the Xpan negatives, and requires software stitch after the scan. But it is a huge improvement compared to Coolscan 8000ED/9000ED workflow.

1. Feed Xpan negative to Nikon SA-30 film holder on a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED scanner.

2. Launch Vuescan, click Input tab, and turn off Frame alignment.

3. Click Preview button to get the preview of the first picture. Set appropriate Frame offset so that the beginning edge of the first picture is close to the edge of the scanning area.

4. Click Crop tab, set manual crop size, making sure that the crop area covers the full length of the scanning area.

5. Adjust all other settings as your wish.

6. In Input tab, check Lock exposure.

7. In input tab, set Frame spacing to 66.500. This is arguably the most important parameter to set!

8. Turn on Batch scan, and press Scan button to scan the whole roll for the first pass.

9. Increase Frame offset from its old value by 29.5. For example, if the old Frame offset is 3, you should change it to 32.5 (= 29.5 + 3).

10. Set Frame number to 1, and press Scan button to scan the whole roll for the second pass.

That's it. You will get two batches of images that are ready to be stitched in software. After saving the settings to a Vuescan profile, the only thing you need to do is to adjust the Frame offset after the preview.

SA-30 holder is hard to find on the market. Fortunately, there is an easy hack to turn a regular SA-21 holder into an SA-30 [3].

I hope this will not further push up the now already hefty price of Nikon Coolscan 5000ED and Xpan cameras. But who knows?

[1] https://www.stockholmviews.com/xpan-scanning/index.html

[2] https://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/84761-xpan-and-coolscan-5000/

[3] http://www.helmut-stoepfgeshoff.de/sa21-sa30e.html

Cylou said:

Thanks for your answers. Does anyone has example/experience of the plustek 135i xpan scan ?

Click to expand...

I haven't used that one, but I would not be optimistic based on my experiences with other Plustek scanners. To be blunt, they're junk. When my Nikon scanner died four years ago, I didn't have much money to spend so I tried to buy a Plustek 8200i, which is one they market as a 'pro' scanner. I bought and returned fove of them before giving up and buying another Nikon. Why? None of them would give an image that was equally sharp across the whole frame. One side of the image would be sharp, the other side would be very, very soft. It wasn't the same side that was bad in each scanner I tried. There was just no quality control.

Cylou said:

Quality scan is really the mainpoint here.

Click to expand...

There truly are many ways to scan an Xpan negative, but nowadays all have turned into clunky and cobbled together options. Fortunately the camera industry came to the rescue with DSLR's or similar mirrorless cameras. The upside is that you get a 'free' camera that can be used for other things than just scanning (try that with a Flextight), and you can even have fun with the macro lens. The downside is that for a panoramic negative there is a lot of wasted sensor area so you need to use a camera with a large number of megapixels or one that can pixel shift to make up the numbers. It is however possible to use a lower resolution camera by photographing the negative in sections and stitching them, and it would avoid the digital noise film scanners produce for a better quality.

250swb said:

The downside is that for a panoramic negative there is a lot of wasted sensor area so you need to use a camera with a large number of megapixels or one that can pixel shift to make up the numbers. It is however possible to use a lower resolution camera by photographing the negative in sections and stitching them, and it would avoid the digital noise film scanners produce for a better quality.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure what 'digital noise' you're referring to. Do you own a film scanner? Can you provide an example of your film scanner scans? This way we might be able to diagnose your issue. Digital noise from a film scanner could be due to a faulty firewire board, issues with the power supply or issues with a poorly lubricated worm gear.

In general, it's actually digital camera scanning that introduces noise due to the less than ideal sensors most digital cameras use. It's been discussed here at some length, read up on Bayer/X-trans interpolation and on the topic of 'demosaicing', which is a source of colour and especially resolution inaccuracies.

The only way to address these inherent downsides of amateur DSLR scanning solutions is by means of pixel-shifting, which is slow (thereby negating the main advantage of DSLR scanning, which is speed) and error prone (micro-vibrations will have a visible impact on result).

Can you get excellent DSLR scans? Yes, but it's hard work, loads of tinkering and loads of $$$. And you need to own a DSLR, which costs more $$$.

Cylou said:

I was considering a Plustek OpicFilm 120 Pro butt seems still unavailable.

Click to expand...

Actually the official site says 'relaunch coming soon'.


Might be interesting. I still own an old Plustek 7500i I paid 90£ for on Gumtree (the UK's craiglist). That's 115$. Less than a hipster 3D-printed holder for DSLR scanning. It did a really ok job for the price, after a mirror clean.

albireo said:

I'm not sure what 'digital noise' you're referring to. Do you own a film scanner? Can you provide an example of your film scanner scans? This way we might be able to diagnose your issue. Digital noise from a film scanner could be due to a faulty firewire board, issues with the power supply or issues with a poorly lubricated worm gear.

In general, it's actually digital camera scanning that introduces noise due to the less than ideal sensors most digital cameras use. It's been discussed here at some length, read up on Bayer/X-trans interpolation and on the topic of 'demosaicing', which is a source of colour and especially resolution inaccuracies.

Click to expand...

Is your Google broken? If you aren't sure what digital noise is from film scanning can I refer you to this thread,

https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/digital-noise-after-scanning.171314/

and there are many similar threads and articles about noise introduced by scanners. In an ideal world you'd have the very highest resolution scanner and scan a perfect negative, but the world isn't ideal. Sometimes your scanner is a an Epson flatbed and not a Flextight, sometimes your negative is under exposed. When things aren't ideal noise can be generated by the scanner because it is trying to compensate for information in the negative that isn't there, like missing detail in blown highlights or under exposed shadows. And with B&W scanning scanners can mistake the space between the film grain as 'empty' and fill then in with noise.

But I have a question of my own, please explain more about 'the less than ideal sensors' in digital cameras which introduce digital noise when photographing a negative (but not when photographing a landscape)? I mean this thing about the difference between base ISO and high ISO has been known for years, and base ISO is now so clean across all manufacturers that people have basically stopped talking about it. But noise would only apply if you were photographing your negative at a higher than base ISO, and what idiot would do that? But in any case a DSLR would treat an underexposed shadow as black, and a blown highlight as white, it simply photographs what is in front of it.

You guys seem very angry. Maybe go take some photos would help.