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Comment by fuziontech | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad this exists but at ~1k EUR I would be interested if it could scan 120 medium format negatives...but the fact that it does not is an absolute deal breaker for me. It seems like they are considering it. I hope they do figure that out sooner than later.

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Medium is the problem. There’s nothing.

Epson stopped making their flatbeds that do film, reportedly because they can’t get the CCDs anymore. That may be a rumor.

The result is they go for 2x MSRP on eBay for models that are many years old. Because that’s all that exists.

Without that, you can buy the kind of scanner meant for a photo lab ($$$$$), DIY it with a DSLR ($$$ if you don’t have one), or pay your a lab a lot per roll and hope they do a good job.

I’m not saying it’s a giant market but it certainly seems to me like there’s enough of one that it could support a small product.

You can get brand new Plustek OpticFilm scanners for 35mm and smaller starting around $300, and there are plenty of other options above that. Plus the DIY.

I’m sure 35mm is easier to make and certainly a bigger market but it’s also a lot more crowded.

I expect their specs are far better than the $300 one I’ve mentioned, I don’t know enough to know. But medium format people are desperate for anything.

Not that they're cheap, but you can get Imacon scanners for much less than they retailed for. I inherited a Flextight Precision II and it still does a great job.

Do you use it with an old computer, or do you have a good way to interface a SCSI scanner with a modern machine? I tried to get my Precision II up and running but the SCSI card driver would crash Windows at random intervals.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250118205639/http://pathar.tl/...

This is way out of date. I have since been able to get it working on a Windows 11 4th gen Intel machine with 64-bit drivers cobbled together from a couple of versions of FlexColor and some .inf modification. It's not flawless, there's some major corruption that can occur when trying to use certain operations, but overall it works for my needs.

I tried some scanning on a Plustek 8300, which is supposed to be the fastest. The process is still extremely manual/slow and I don't think it's practical on a large scale. Many families who owned cameras in the 60s-70s-80s-90s will have potentially thousands of negatives to scan, but I don't see a solution that will automate that digitalization process.

Software could also use some improvement. Automating batch correction and clean up should be easier, IMO.

This really isn’t my area but it sounds like nothing is fast. DSLR may be fastest without just flat out hiring someone else to do it. But even with thousands of shots that would still take quite a lot of time.

And yeah, workflow is the thing that seems the worst. That seems like a great place to try to improve things to get a sale.

> I expect their specs are far better than the $300 one I’ve mentioned

It's not, it's actually quite a bit worse, especially with color reproduction.

> Epson stopped making their flatbeds that do film, reportedly because they can’t get the CCDs anymore. That may be a rumor.

Wow, you weren’t kidding, I completely missed this. I bought one, sold it, then bought and currently own another. I better baby it, there’s really nothing like it out there.

I don't shoot 120, only 35mm. But I thought you could get away with a high end flatbed scanner for 120 negatives?

From what I’ve seen people mostly used the Epson scanners like the V600, V700, V850, etc.

They stopped making them early this year. Only the top end model for $1500 still exists and I don’t know if that’s because they still make it or just that there is still stock left at Amazon/etc.

>Epson stopped making their flatbeds that do film

I don’t understand this… the V850 Pro is still being publicly sold with film and slide trays… what am I missing?

And even eBay is selling them at only about $1,200-1-700 CAD, which is considerably cheaper than the 2,000+ CAD MSRP.

All the cheaper models that used to exist are gone. So the entry price went from like $300 MSRP to something much higher.

Are you taking about other models like the v600 and v700? Because I’m not. I’ve never really seen those models with film scanning tools, it was usually only the v850 that came with film scanning tools. So I have always expected to have to stump up for a v850 if I wanted to do film scanning.

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