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> (also, re:"get a new scanner", I'm not sure how slide scanners these days would compare to that 5400. Sometimes technology peaks and then gets worse, especially on the consumer end as the market shrinks, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is true for film scanning tech)

I have a 5400 as well. I think that maybe the current Plustek scanners are its equal in most ways (and are hopefully quieter!) but you're right. Even the 5400 II is not really an improvement over the 5400.

Side note about the 5400: if it should totally die, there's a market on eBay for whole machines for parts, but you'll notice that most of them do not include the lens.

The reason is that the lens a) fully covers full frame and b) is ridiculously sharp and a favourite with macro photographers:

https://www.closeuphotography.com/minolta-dimage-scan-elite-...

I was going to sell my 5400 but I've concluded I will keep it, and when it dies I will retrieve the lens.

The 5400 is a really great scanner. Vuescan is a bit odd to get used to but it opens so much control and the possibility to scan color negatives using the “advanced workflow” where you lock the orange mask film base compensation values across a roll (or a batch of rolls). I much prefer to use Vuescan over the original software which assesses every exposure on its own and doesn’t let you control very much.

Vuescan also supports creating and using custom input profiles if you have an IT8 target as either a slide or a reflective object that you photograph (documentation claims that this won’t work but I found it to be an improvement - essentially profiling the combo of the unique characteristics of the sensor and a certain film type and some variability from lab conditions)

The hardware on the 5400 is about as good as it gets for scanning 35mm unless you get into Imacon territory. Doing comparisons between the 5400 and an Imacon 848, I’ve never been very convinced the 5400 is missing out on much. The one weak spot with the 5400 in my opinion is the film holder’s inability to perfectly keep a curly negative flat at the ends of the strip, a problem that the Imacon gracefully and completely solves with its curved film path. On the 5400 back-rolling stubborn negatives before scanning at full resolution usually does the trick.

Vuescan will also let you save raw versions with an optional separate layer for the IR channel which can be used to handle motivation. I like the idea of capturing as much data as possible with the ability to process as you wish later.

Ed Hamrick has always been responsive and helpful if I have contacted him about something. A few years ago I realized I had been using Vuescan happily and consistently for 15 years for only a single payment of less than $100 and bought a second for the heck of it.

I have some old notes about then 5400 posted here http://alibosworth.com/technical/#scanning

"get a new scanner" doesn't work when no currently manufactured scanners have the same features that some of the old ones did. In particular, anything involving film scanning seems to involve painful use of film holders when 35mm has sprockets for a reason. I suppose I should be happy I never bought into APS film :P

I did, and that's why the Konica Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV is a great scanner as it automatically winds through the APS films scanning each film. Vuescan was a life saver to be able to continue using my scanner!

Very few scanners will use sprocket transport for 35mm, really just minilabs doing scanning before it's sliced I'd think. Also much of the film community leans towards medium format/large format (if you're going to the hassle of dealing with film, make it worth it in quality, basically) which don't have sprocket holes at all.

Virtually all film scanners past and present use a film holder to make the film easier for the scanner (and the human) to manipulate and to offload the problem of film flatness to a sub-assembly. That's completely normal imo.

You are correct though that the film scanner market is dead as a doornail, film isn't exactly a high-volume business (however, afaik it is slowly growing however - that market hit bottom in the early '10s and Kodak/Ilford sales are growing these days). The entire market consists of the Epson V600 at the low end, Epson V850 Pro at the high end, and then Hasselblad makes the Flextight line at the professional end ($12-15k). Then you've got various old/discontinued models with varying level of support. So VueScan is really doing a solid here keeping that hardware in service.

One of these days I need to upgrade my V500 (predecessor to the v600) to a V850 so I can do large format on a flatbed. Right now I am using a Polaroid SprintScan 45 Ultra (which is a SCSI scanner that is only supported on VueScan anymore). I would love a Flextight but it's not justifiable and the options for a modern CCD (which, in parlance, is basically the opposite of a flatbed) are nonexistent other than that.

Unfortunately doing anything other than 35mm brings a massive jump in price, so I think it's here to stay for a long time. I loved doing medium format/120, but it's absolutely cost prohibitive. Minilabs scanning before it's sliced? Oh hey that's me!

Basically film development has become so expensive that it's more economical for me to either develop (or have developed) the roll and then scan all the pictures to see what they are. Realistically, I have nobody to share prints with, so any photo I want to share has to be digitised anyways. The TIFFs /are/ the prints now.

Film holders make my life pain since alignment becomes a huge problem, however film carriers are good. They're usually some roller assembly that may or may not have a thru-path (in the case of my nikon it can take up to 6 frames before bottoming out). Sprockets are usually counted optically - I've never actually seen something that physically engaged with the sprockets. I've tried using a flatbed but the time spent aligning (during which dust has an opportunity to come to the party) and slowness of the scan means what used to be "1 hour photo" is now more like 3 hours. I explored pacific rim's primefilm options, but swore them off when I discovered 2 scans of the same image would have odd distortions. The stepper motor was vibrating the CCD!

I know a lot of people use Epson flatbeds at the low end for a hobby, but how can you deal with that massive time sink? I've been on the edge about trying to create one of those camera based scanners. I've seen plenty of small trapezoidal scanners that are definitely a smartphone camera pointed at a light box, and I'd actually be fine with this, but they almost always just output pre-baked jpegs to an sdcard for grandma. I've been toying with the idea of recreating one with a raspberry pi & their "pro" camera so that I can have controls over the scanning process. Literally any control at all would be nice.

I still miss my old sony scanner's ability to set a film colour correction profile by reading the barcode on the edge of the negative /and/ set the frame count and filename in a batch from that data.

You could try this https://roy.vanegas.org/thoughts/how-i-installed-the-konica-...

Oh this is wonderful . Thanks !

Bookmarking this for when I visit my parents with Easter, thanks!

I use Vuescan with my Dimage Scan Dual IV! It works a dream. Software is much better than the Konica Minolta software. Also, works in modern Windows and Mac OSes.

Don't get a new scanner, use a DSLR + macro lens with a light board. Works great

Yes, this does work well (and it gives you a bunch of options for rapidly extracting a lot of dynamic range out of a transparency.)

But you can maybe even use the lens from your scanner, if you can liberate it and mount it.

Film scanners typically have a thin strip that is often rather wider than a frame of film (because that was the way they achieved higher scan resolution at lower cost).

So what you have in your scanner is a tiny, sharp, fixed aperture lens with an image circle generally large enough for full frame.

Many film scanners capture four channels of exposure data: RGB and infrared. Since developed film can block visible light but is more or less transparent to IR, that winds up being a pretty good map of where all the dust specks are. Which, in turn, allows automatic and very targeted software dust removal that can completely avoid parts of the exposure without dust, producing A quality of output more comparable to that of laborious retouching than inferior automatic software dust removal without a dust map.

IMO that alone is sufficient to justify a film scanner over a DSLR.

That doesn't work with black and white film (except chromogenic C41 ones), unfortunately.

Or Kodachrome (because the slides are sort of lumpy).