[HN Gopher] My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old...
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My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner
Author : williamsmj
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-12-03 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.vladovince.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.vladovince.com)
| daneel_w wrote:
| Nice setup. $50 for a used LS-2000 is a steal! I used the Minolta
| Dimage Scan Dual II for many years until it broke down, at which
| point I could not afford a replacement. I stopped shooting with
| film almost 15 years ago but for a long time had my eyes on a
| used Coolscan 4000 for those eventual few moments where I found a
| forgotten slide or strip of film I hadn't scanned, but eventually
| settled with the Reflecta CrystalScan 7200. Though it's not quite
| as good I find it an entirely acceptable film scanner on a
| budget.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I can't contribute on that exact setup since I only used windows
| xp / usb film scanner for a similar but much less dpi setup but
| setting up a vintage Mac OS 9 system is not that hard. The
| hardware an iMac g3/g4 are still accessible and cheap enough on
| eBay and you can make them more reliable. A laptop also makes it
| easier out of the box. Emulation also works.
|
| SCSI isn't scary. It wasn't scary in 2006 and it shouldn't be
| scary today.
|
| I share the same age as this writer, if not very close since the
| life events are similar e.g. high school in mid 00s. I find
| having a dark room and using proper technique and developer, or
| even Lightroom processing 10-50x more complicated then running a
| vintage Mac OS 9 or diving into scsi hardware.
|
| It should not deter anyone and it had the same languish by people
| in the same time period.
|
| After all these years I think manually mapping IRQs or having pop
| the side of the case off to move jumpers around for IRQs to be
| more challenging. I'm just surprised to read that SCSI is
| annoying. I wonder when I'll be reading similar Context about
| using IDE drives or serial ports (okay baud rate issues can be
| annoying).
|
| By all means not to be negative, article is excellent. I just see
| it as a trope: "scsi is hard"
| ginko wrote:
| Nikon CoolScan devices work flawlessly with SANE on modern linux
| btw.
| WWLink wrote:
| Linux scanner support is amazing. I have a >10 year old
| printer/scanner/fax machine that I still use for scanning and
| faxing sometimes. Getting scanning to work in modern MacOS or
| Windows is ... an adventure. It's possible! But an adventure
| for sure.
|
| I was delighted when I opened the scanner tool in fedora/gnome
| for laughs and it showed the (networked) machine as a scanning
| source. And I selected it. AND IT WORKED. I never even had to
| set it up!
| zeristor wrote:
| VueScan rescued my Epson 2450, the interface is a bit clunky but
| it works.
|
| I would love for more efficient workflow to scan the few thousand
| slides I still have.
|
| There must be some 3D printing plans for film holders on the flat
| bed.
|
| It would be handy to take it apart to clean the bed glass, but I
| daren't if it breaks.
| le-flaneur wrote:
| I've been using a Coolscan 8000 and a 2007 iMac for 17 years
| (prior to that, I used a Mac Mini for a short while) and only
| last year had to replace the scanner motherboard after an
| international move. To continue to use Nikon's software, the iMac
| is still on 10.6 Snow Leopard.
|
| I shoot 35mm and medium format and the Coolscan pulls
| extraordinary detail from the negatives - vastly better than the
| best flatbed scanners I've ever used.
| mdswanson wrote:
| I also run a Nikon Coolscan and Epson 750 Pro on my Windows 11
| machine. I also shoot slides using my Sony A7RIII with
| appropriate lighting and mounts. The Coolscan consistently
| gives me the best results.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I've heard great things about drum scanners (and seem some
| amazing comparisons). I'm hoping to send some of my medium format
| film to get a 100MP-level scan.
|
| Amusingly enough, I found that my B&W Ilford film shots (on all
| three different film types I tried) have way less detail (or
| "resolution") than standard iso400 Kodak color film.
| internet101010 wrote:
| I'm not surprised at all about having to use an old computer to
| get this thing to work. This will become the norm with scanners
| unless someone with more money than sense decides to enter the
| market.
|
| Nearly all of the good consumer-grade scanners (i.e. those that
| use CCD sensors) are out of production and use software that is
| no longer maintained. The main market for scanners has become
| receipts, which has lead to a switch to cheap CIS sensors since
| quality no longer matters.
|
| Outside of expensive specialized scanners, the Epson V600 is
| pretty much the only scanner in production still using a CCD
| sensor and it came out in 2009. It has nearly doubled in price
| over its lifetime to $350 due to lack of competition and I
| presume inflation. It is the de facto scanner used in the trading
| card world because of the output quality and ability to create
| templates within the software (I 3D printed my own brackets to be
| able to scan/crop 4 cards at a time perfectly every time). But
| last I checked MacOS support is pretty much gone and even Windows
| is barely tolerable. Its days are probably numbered, too.
| yapyap wrote:
| I feel like you could totally emulate though, with enough
| effort
| yamanawabi wrote:
| I can run Nikon Scan on an XP VM or use VueScan which is modern
| and has a complete feature set
| jrockway wrote:
| I bought a V800 about 10 years ago for film scanning and it
| worked with modern computers. The quality was quite good as
| well; I wet-mounted my negatives and had pretty much no
| complaints with the quality. Speed was not amazing, of course.
|
| I ended up with a flatbed and not a film scanner because I
| wanted to scan 4x5 negatives.
|
| If I were being rational, I'd just get an A7R or Fuji's medium
| format DSLR for 90% of my photos and have 4x5" and larger
| negatives professionally scanned. For proofing, I always found
| taking a picture of the negative on a lightbox with my phone
| and inverting to be adequate. If you like the photo in that
| form, then you'll like the professional scan.
| cesaref wrote:
| Well, from my experience of going both seriously digital and
| seriously darkroom, i'd keep the two apart. Get a lovely 5x4
| enlarger (or join a darkroom where one is available) and
| you'll enjoy making B&W prints from those negatives much more
| than you'll enjoy scanning them and looking at them on a
| screen.
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't really shoot film for the away-from-the-computer
| experience. Nobody is going to come over to my apartment to
| view my photos, and I'm not going to carry them around to
| show people.
|
| The main reason I shoot film is for higher resolution than
| digital. I can easily get 100 megapixels from my 4x5
| negatives. I have a nice shot of the Manhattan Bridge from
| Brooklyn, and you can zoom in on the TIFF and read the road
| signs on the FDR across the river. I think that's neat.
| That's what I'm out for.
| physhster wrote:
| I don't have anything to add besides that I think it's a very
| cool and creative project, and another good reason to keep that
| crate of cables and adapters in the basement...
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| These "antique" scanners give out such good quality, but it's a
| shame they're so awkward to use. I was too scared of a
| reconditioned hand-me-down and having to deal with missing trays
| and emulated windows XP. Instead, I managed to get a consistent-
| ish setup for scanning negatives using a Sony A7 III camera,
| though this was a case of digitising an existing collection, so I
| went through them all in one go with a 3d printed mask and feed
| mechanism.
|
| With the author lamenting about SD cards being awkward; it
| reminds me of one thing has been immensely useful with the A7 III
| is the built-in FTP auto-upload. This surprised me as reviews
| didn't mention it, and as a seeminly high-end consumer camera I
| wasn't expecting such a "professional" feature. I just have it
| upload everything to my NAS.
|
| Now my next task is to do the same with thousands of dirty
| slides, which is turning out to be far more challenging...
| _visgean wrote:
| Some fujifilm cameras support it seedms: https://fujifilm-
| dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_.... Overall this
| seems better suited for tethered shooting with direct usb-c
| transfer.
| flimsypremise wrote:
| As someone who has built multiple custom macro film scanner
| setups, owns basically very consumer film scanner of note
| (including the Coolscan 9000 and the Minolta Scan Multi Pro), and
| is intimately familiar with the workings of various film scanners
| and science of digitizing film, I don't think this article
| provides particularly good advice.
|
| Just for instance, the LS-2000 features in the post has an
| advertised optical resolution of 2700DPI, which means the
| absolute maximum megapixel resolution you can get out of that
| thing is a little over 10MP. Film scanners are notorious for
| overstating their optical resolution, which has nothing to do
| with the resolution of sensor used to digitize the image data and
| everything to do with the lens in the scanner. You can have a
| 200MP sensor scanning your film but if your lens can only resolve
| 1000DPI you will have a very high resolution image of a low
| resolution lens projection. It's maybe a little better than a
| flatbed and it features dust removal, but in the year of our lord
| 2024 the LS-2000 is not a good choice for scanning film.
|
| As for his macro scanning setup, he appears to be using the
| digitaliza for film holding, which is a notoriously bad product
| with many known flaws. Negative supply makes a line of lower cost
| version of their very good film holders, and Valoi also offers an
| affordable system of components that I highly recommend. There is
| a ton of good information out there about macro scanning, and had
| the OP sought it out he could avoided his little adventure in
| retro computing.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Also, the LS-2000 is a noisy POS. I owned this thing for years
| (bought new) and put plenty of time into it. It just sucks. It
| was only mediocre for slides and black-&-white negatives; for
| color negatives it was nearly useless. You could never remove
| the base negative color and retain good image color. The
| dynamic range sucked.
|
| I sold it on eBay years ago, then researched what might be
| better. The general opinion was that consumer-accessible
| scanning peaked with the Minolta Dimage Elite 5400 II. Of
| course these were long out of manufacture, but I managed to
| find one new in the box on a small auction site. To this day I
| haven't gotten around to scanning a single piece of film with
| it. Maybe this post will finally get me off my ass...
| enthdegree wrote:
| Digitizing film seems to be a perennial pain point. As far as I
| know there is no mostly-automated option to scan multiple film
| formats at high resolution besides paying someone with very
| expensive equipment to do it for you. The obsolete equipment
| like those models you mentioned involves a lot of fastidious
| labor per-frame and is generally pretty awful.
|
| Modern equipment has similar warts. Flatbed scanners are bad
| film imagers for a number of reasons, a few which you already
| wrote. There's a huge volume of new products coming out for
| scanning right now (film holders, copy stands, light panels,
| etc) but these setups are very inconvenient to set up or, to be
| charitable, demand practice and perfect technique. There's
| always people ready to insist they have an easy convenient time
| setting up their SLR scanners and capturing 1000 rolls at 9999
| DPI in 2 minutes. I don't share their experience.
|
| During the pandemic I tried to proof-of-concept a path forward
| without any real success:
|
| - The first attempt involved modifying a Plustek scanner to
| take medium format. This ended up taking a ton of work for each
| medium format frame (4 captures for each of the 4 quadrants,
| and each of those is already slow for a single 35mm frame).
| Stitching these captures is tedious and flaky for images that
| don't have obvious sharp features.
|
| - The other involved rigging the objective of a Minolta Dimage
| Scan Elite II on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera onto an Ender
| printhead to raster over the film with a light table. This
| could have worked but it had many mechanical problems I am not
| cut out to solve (lens mount, camera-to-film-plane alignment)
|
| Leaving aside designing a proper optical path there are 2
| killer problems:
|
| - the problem of mechanically manipulating the negative and
| keeping it in focus
|
| - the problem of stitching together partial captures with
| minimal human intervention
|
| A few people seem to be working on open source backlit line-
| scanners but as far as I know no central path forward has
| emerged. I hope someone figures it out.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I see you mentioned using a 3D printer for scanning medium
| format film. I did something similar, but took the opposite
| approach. I placed the film on a lightbox and mounted that to
| the printer, then had that move around in front of a camera
| with macro lens. I did not have much of a problem with
| alignment.
|
| That being said, this was a one-off, but once I had enough
| overlap with each capture, PTGui was able to switch it
| together relatively hands-free, even with it having lots of
| sky.
| enthdegree wrote:
| Very interesting. What camera/lens/lightbox did you use and
| around what DPI you achieve?
| kkukshtel wrote:
| Allow me a moment here to ask - could someone please build a
| modern Epson V600 that can process at least three frames of 6x7
| medium format film at once?
|
| This area of tech seems totally stagnant (obviously) but seems
| like a great time for someone with some hardware smarts and
| interest to innovate for low cost.
| subhro wrote:
| It actually exists. It's called Plustek Opticfilm 120, though
| not particularly low cost, and I have one for sale.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Got to shout out to VueScan for making obsolete scanners usable
| on modern operating systems. It's not free, but is reasonably
| priced. If you can physically connect your scanner (scsi2usb is
| an exercise left to the reader), then it's likely to let you use
| it.
| geephroh wrote:
| +1000 for VueScan. And they have perpetual licensing -- take
| that, Adobe.
| trwhite wrote:
| Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around
| ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing PS20/25 in the UK. A lot of
| the good labs over here (Peak Imaging for example) went bust too.
|
| I poke fun at film shooters today who heap praise on e.g. Kodak
| Gold or the cheap Fuji equivalents because it's all they can
| really afford/get their hands on. I wouldn't have even considered
| shooting it 10 years ago
| phony-account wrote:
| The 'antiqueness' and alleged difficulty of scanning with Nikon
| Coolscans is very overstated in this article. I'm using a
| Coolscan 9000 with a single adapter on an M3 Pro MacBook running
| Sequoia (latest MacOS). No exotic hardware needed whatsoever.
| mdswanson wrote:
| Likewise, I run my Nikon Coolscan on my Windows 11 machine with
| no special adapters. Works better than my Epson 750 Pro and
| Sony A7RIII with the right lenses, mounts, and lighting.
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