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Comment by sbszllr | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has a mirrorless scanning setup for my film, and pondered getting a dedicated scanner... the price of this is quite steep given how inflexible of a tool it is.

A second hand DSLR setup is going to be roughly the same price or less. I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers. If you want fancy and experimental, filmomat has arguably a more interesting but pricier offering.

But naysaying aside, I hope they manage to find a niche that allows them to survive as a company, and keep the analog photography revival alive.

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I bought some time on a hasselblad medium format scanner (took fucking ages)

The results are good, as you'd expect. However can I tell the difference between that and me putting the negatives on a decent softbox and using a fancy camera to take a picture? yes, but not by much.

I think the main issue is film registration, that is getting the film to be flat and "co-planar" to the lens so the whole frame is sharp.

My negatives are slightly warped, so they really need a frame to make sure they are perfectly flat. But for instagram, they are close enough.

However scanning more than a few pictures is a massive pain in the arse. If I was scanning film regularly, then this is what I'd want, and its cheaper than the competition.

Assuming that its actually any good, I haven't seen any scans yet.

It'd be nice if they were able to adapt the Hasselblad/Imacon "virtual drum" concept and curve the film underneath the sensor for side-to-side flatness. I wonder if that's feasible with a 2D sensor.

You could, but it probably makes more sense to do focus stacking in that case

Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner

personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...

> Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner

Both.

> personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...

It's not - the issue that still remains is keeping the film flat, and this is especially problematic with smaller formats. With current solutions you can get the resolution but not the flatness, or you sacrifice something to get the flatness (e.g. ANR glass holders). It's the old glass vs glassless carrier debate, applied to a modern workflow.

I repeat myself: focus, DPI / resolution, dynamic range - these are the solved problems. In fact, modern medium format digital cameras are superior on all these factor. Keeping the film flat, however? Only drum scans and the Imacon "Flextight" solution do this well.

Of course, it depends on what you plan to do with the scans and for 99% of people the solution in the link above is more than good enough.

I've written about this previously https://leejo.github.io/tags/scanning/ # I'm going to add the fourth, and hopefully final, part in a couple of months time.

I almost missed the price. Wow you're right that's a lot! And the final retail price is 1599 euros. I have a good Plustek that cost me $300 or $400. Automated transport and unantiquated software sounds nice, but those features are not worth an extra $600-1,100 to me.

Am I missing something or is this supposed to be in another tier of image quality?

It's actually a lower DPI and no IR sensor.

Honestly I feel like anything beyond 5 megapixels per frame is pushing beyond reasonable expectations with 35mm. This is certainly the case with any kind of available light or high speed work in silver-halide process, the area where I figure most people are going to be using this device. Lab-work in C41 and E6 is definitely possible at home but must account for single digit percentage of the home analogue market.

Never. 20 Mp if you want "lossless".

I think I see what you mean. It’s the difference between having an image showing the shape and texture of each film grain, and an image which looks like what I saw in the camera and which isn’t going to be any sharper. The former has value but the latter was always good enough for me and, surprisingly, rather low in resolution compared to subsequent DSLRs and mirrorless cameras I bought in the 2010s.

Ilford Delta 400 pushed two stops to 1600 ASA in a 1970s Asahi Pentax SP1000 was always going to produce… artistic results, requiring as much imagination as acuity to appreciate the subject. (Read: see past the blur.)

You are right in that a lot of advertised DPI over 5MP is interpolated and not actual sensor DPI.

I digitise a lot of 35mm.

A 36Mp camera is not enough to best a 4000ppi scanner. You need about 60-70 mp to resolve the detail of a scan to similar level .

Even a layman can see the difference at 100%

A 4000 DPI scan of 135 gives you 21 megapixels. So 36MP with a good lens will easily resolve just as much detail. There is not 60-70MP of information in a 4000 DPI scan, period.

For most films, anything beyond 4000 DPI is just going to help resolve the grain particles or dye cloud shapes. You have to be shooting slow fine grained BW with the best lenses to need more.

For me real grain looks much better than digital smoothness. That is important for big prints.

"…beyond 5 megapixels per frame is pushing beyond reasonable expectations with 35mm."

Well, as I mentioned elsewhere old fashioned Kodachrome resolves ~100 lines/mm and some newer color emulsion are considerably higher, and of course B&W ones have even higher resolutions.

Given that a 35mm frame is 36x24mm even Kodachrome achieves 8.64 megapixels. OK, let's allow for an overgenerous Kell factor of say 0.8, this figure will drop to ~6.9 megapixels. Given the ready availability of emulsions with higher resolutions, especially the best B&W ones then a figure well in excess of 5 megapixels is relizable in practice.

Of course, that doesn't take into account the image chain as a whole, lenses, displays, compression, etc. which would reduce the effective resolution. That said, these days the typical image chain can easily achieve much higher pixel throughput than 5 megapixels before bandwidth limiting so the effective Kell derating factor could easily be kept quite small.

Dynamic range is much better (120dB is ~20 stops, your plustek is ~12 stops.

If that matters, I’m not sure.

I wondered what the price was. 1599 seems pretty decent.I was expecting about 4k This is about the price of a venerable Nikon 5000. Some of the setups use film mounts that cost as much as this whole unit.

Are there any sample images

That was over twenty years ago! Why should it cost that now?

> A second hand DSLR setup is going to be roughly the same price or less.

And if you get one with Pixel Shift, you can get way higher resolutions than the 22MP they're offering (e.g. my cheapo Olympus gets 40MP JPEG or 64MP RAW from a 16MP sensor.)

The Olympus pixel shift bodies are underappreciated stand cameras. The quality is just bananas.

You’re for sure exceeding the linear resolving power of 35mm film at 40MP or 64MP.

However, a Bayer-filtered sensor has lower color resolution, since each pixel only sees one color. So the pixel shift really helps quite a bit here since the sensor (and Bayer array) are shifting relative to the film multiple times per exposure.

High-quality film scanners maintain color resolution by using linear sensors without Bayer filtering. But they’re slow and expensive.

Some modern 35mm emulsions can record ~500 megapixels worth of detail, but good luck getting all that detail in a digital scan.

https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/

The scan is the least of the problems - good luck getting to that level of detail with mostly vintage lenses, balancing depth of field and diffraction, keeping the film perfectly flat, on a stable enough tripod with no vibration whatsoever; developing perfectly in the dedicated developer. Yes, it's impressive but no, it's not relevant to the average user or hobbyist.

I wonder how this compares to Technical Pan, which I imagine it was modeled after.

500 megapixels can have less detail than an old 1 mpix digital from 2001.

[Image resolution is a very complicated topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution) and megapixel count, or even lines/mm does not tell the full story.

All the current Nikon Z bodies (and probably other brands too) have different levels of pixel shift where it’ll take 4 or 8 images and basically cancel out that it’s a bayer sensor. The bayer array is a 4 pixel pattern, so it moves one pixel to the right then one down and then one back to capture all 3 channels for each individual pixel. For things like film scanning it works flawlessly, I use it all the time.

Then it’ll do a 16 or 32 shot stack in order to do the same thing but with more resolution.

It’s been a feature of Olympus (now OM System) high-end cameras for years. I did not realize that Nikon had picked it up as well.

Filmomat looks fun. Many money. Love the hipster flex with the Weber HG-1 in background of the demonstration video. I do own an Intrepid enlarger (sort of experimental?), and I used to live near Ars Imago in Zurich who sell a "lab in a box", similar to Filmomat's Light system. The independent dev scene is pretty great, though none of it is particularly cheap and is rarely open source, which is disappointing.

> I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers.

The obvious one is auto-feeding and portability, but without using it who knows. It doesn't offer IR, but even Filmomat's system needs a modified camera. You get that with most flatbed and Plustek-style scanners. I have a V850 Pro which wasn't cheap either, but it'll do a full roll in one go and I can walk away. Even if I shot a roll a day it would be more than fast enough. It has occasional focus issues, and you need to be scrupulous about dusting, but it works well enough. I've never been a huge fan of the setup required for copy-stand scanning and it's tricky getting the negatives perfectly flat in/frame. The good carriers are also not cheap, look at Negative Supply for example.

Frankly it also looks great, like the Filmomat. I think some of the appeal is a chunk of modern looking hardware and also the hope that it's maintained? My Epson works well, but I ended up paying for VueScan because the OEM software is temperamental.

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