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Comment by nubinetwork | Hacker News Reader

Is this better than using a flatbed scanner?

Not really. Flatbeds give excellent consistency in their results and their workflow. Setups with digital cameras vary, require quite a bit of equipment for the serious, and are subject to a lot of variations in the process plus require more post-processing IMHO - from cropping to correction. They can also not deal with dust and scratches like an ICE scanner can.

Not everything is about resolution.

Digital camera scanning folks are enthusiastic and I’m all for it, but there’s a huge amount of value in a simpler process and automation. Look up camera scanning equipment and you’ll see an enormous amount of kit available to optimize these setups. There’s a reason it needs optimizing! :)

I have two slide projectors but haven’t used them since the 1990s because of all the faff and the fact that projection degrades slides. Plus the space required.

There is not much automation with flatbed scanners. (neither with DSLR). Post processing is the same if you chose so.

Negativelab Pro converts negatives to a usable image without issue. You can always tweak settings if you want. It works for both types.

You might just want to pay someone to do it. I used to have one of these $20,000 Hasselblad X5s and they do a really nice job with slides -- you can get someone to scan your slides on theirs, e.g.:

https://www.iconla.com/film-services/imacon-scanning/

DSLR (or mirrorless) scanning is way superior to flatbed. Not just quality but also speed. You can "scan" a roll of 36 pictures in ~10 minutes compared to 5 minutes per frame with a flatbed.

How does that work exactly? Do you have some sort of jig for positioning the slides, lighting, etc?

The way I did it was: 3d print a jig that held a very bright LED, a diffuser plate (to spread the LED light over the entire slide), the slide, and lens, and then pointed my DSLR at that. It wasn't very fast but I can easily see several ways I could have sped it up.

It's definitely not superior in quality compared to a good flatbed but speed is much better.

The best flatbed you can get as a consumer (Epson v850) is about as good as a mid range dedicated scanner (plustek), and it costs 2 or 3 times more.

A proper camera based setup is both faster and better in term of output. I scan my own film with a 40 mpx debayered camera and get at least 4 times the effective resolution of my v850

I have hundreds of old rolls of B&W film I want to scan. I was looking at the v850 which seems to have a 6400dpi resolution which is ~60MP for 35mm film. Or a plustek opticfilm. Can you clarify what sort of camera based rig at a similar price point would be superior? Where’s the 4x resolution come in?

You can scan a 35mm frame at 1200 billion megapixel it doesn't mean you get 1200 billion megapixel of usable data

Most scanners top out at 60% of their claimed resolution, which means scanning at 6400dpi gives you something closer to 3200dpi, for the v850 it's a bit worse actually

https://www.filmscanner.info/en/EpsonPerfectionV850Pro.html

> According to our resolution chart, this equals an effective resolution of about 2300 ppi

I have side by side of cms20 film zoomed in at 100% that show a much much much better level of details on my camera based setup than on the Epson v850 and plustek 8100.

> Can you clarify what sort of camera based rig at a similar price point would be superior?

Any modern FF camera (>2012) with any semi decent macro lens (nikkor 55 3.5) will produce better results, even if marginally, while being much faster. You can get a Sony a7rII and a macro lens for less than a v850, then you need a light source (led panel, laptop screen, ebook screen), two panes of glass to hold the film flat and some kind of tube to hold the camera on top of the negative. If you're on a budget you could probably make it work for half of the cost of a v850

It takes less space and you can use it as a camera, while the scanner is just a scanner

While a lot of scanners advertise crazy high resolutions, this is often just marketing mumbo jumbo. They only resolve details at half or a quarter of the claimed resolution. See www.filmscanner.info for tests of the resolution on many scanners. My Nikon CoolScan scans at 4000 dpi and has an insanely sharp lens, which is enough to resolve the grain on most 35mm film stocks. Unless you shoot a lot of 50 iso and lower, thats more than enough

See also this: https://www.film4ever.info/vtt for a affordable test target.

Can you tell us more about your setup?

I used to scan film with a Hasselblad X5, but I seemed to be hitting the level of grain with that beast.

I'm using a monochrome Leica, with a lens harvested from a Minolta dimage 5400 scanner, the rest is a very crude diy setup, a pvc tube to hold the camera, two panes of glass, a laptop screen as backlight

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

That's some fantastic information, thank you so much! I'm always interested in what can be done to improve the scans of old film. I think we're coming really close to perfection now. I'm especially stoked with how AI, when used very judiciously, can perform dust and scratch removal miracles.

For 35mm, flatbeds just do not have comparable resolution to a digital camera with a good macro lens. The most you'll get out of the best flatbed is about 2300dpi (measured from resolved detail, not pixels). Generally, you end up with about 6-8MP of usable detail.

If you own a digital camera already and are comfortable tinkering with your setup and workflow at first, camera scanning is the way to go. You'll get almost the full detail that 35mm film has to offer in less time overall for about the same cost.

This simply isnt true. A DSLR with a sharp macro lens is a lot better than a flatbed. A dedicated filmscanner like those made by Nikon and Minolta 15-20 years ago, is very slow, but the quality is even higher

20 years ago so had a 4000 dpi film scanner. It was very slow, noisy, and memory hungry. But it made great scans. I have hundreds of rolls of B&W 35mm and 6x7’s on 120 film that I’d love to rescan. I don’t own a digital camera to take a photo of the film. Does anyone have experience on how to go about this? I’ve searched across HN and didn’t come up with much. Surely there are 35mm shooters today that have some contemporary high quality solution? Perhaps an epson v850? This thread gives me pause that it’d not be as good as using a digital camera rig.

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