8 ms·

My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner

123 points by williamsmj 2y ago

daneel_w 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
Nikon CoolScan devices work flawlessly with SANE on modern linux btw.
- WWLink 2y ago
  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!
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
    In general, if there aren't Image Capture drivers, then older, largely 32-bit scan software won't work on Catalina or newer. It's kind of a gamble, and you sometimes have to manually run the device file from the image capture directory to get it to properly load the driver. I remember the only challenge getting my TMA flatbed scanner working with Ubuntu Studio in 2010 was downloading an extra xsane package.
zeristor 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I feel like you could totally emulate though, with enough effort
- yamanawabi 2y ago
  I can run Nikon Scan on an XP VM or use VueScan which is modern and has a complete feature set
- jrockway 2y ago
  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.
physhster 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Some fujifilm cameras support it seedms: https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_usage/ftp_upload/index.html#ftp_setting https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_.... Overall this seems better suited for tethered shooting with direct usb-c transfer.
flimsypremise 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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...
  - jnovek 2y ago
    B&Ws also scan poorly on it if the negatives are even a little bit dense. Tricky negatives that could still produce good images in the darkroom had no hope on the LS-2000.
kkukshtel 2y ago
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 2y ago
  It actually exists. It’s called Plustek Opticfilm 120, though not particularly low cost, and I have one for sale.
BuildTheRobots 2y ago
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 2y ago
  +1000 for VueScan. And they have perpetual licensing -- take that, Adobe.
  - msisk6 2y ago
    My current Vuescan license is from 1999. And I think that one was just to replace an older serial due to some upgrade on their end. It's probably the most bang for the buck of any software I've actually purchased. I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well. Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.
trwhite 2y ago
Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 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
- jnovek 2y ago
  I shoot cheap color film (and have for almost 20 years) because I like the conspicuous grain pattern. Likewise I shoot quite a bit of 5222 which I develop in rodinal.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Black and white film is still dirt cheap. Even colour film isn't that expensive now, adjusted for inflation.
- positus 2y ago
  Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.
  - trwhite 2y ago
    A SINGLE roll of Portra 400 120 here in the UK is £15 or about $19. I remember when you could buy 5 rolls for that. It's insane
- trwhite 2y ago
  Talking to myself but... I just don't understand the downvotes on my comment. Saying cheap film is shit offends people? It's still shit. Get over it.
phony-account 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  I'm curious about this adapter since I've never seen a single-stage USB-C to FireWire.
  - Clamchop 2y ago
    Yeah I did this for a DV cam and needed two adapters: USB C to the old DisplayPort form of Thunderbolt, and then that to Firewire. And even that wasn't complete, because I needed to adapt to the smaller Firewire port on the camera. Obviously they could make a single stage adapter but I didn't find it if it exists.
__mharrison__ 2y ago
30 seconds of searching reveals there are Linux drivers for the Nikon LS-2000. Seems a lot easier to deal with (and probably more stable).
egorfine 2y ago
I am looking at his DSLR vs scanner pictures and I cannot believe my eyes. Do DSLR "scans" of film really look that bad or the author has done a suboptimal scan with the camera?
- kataklasm 2y ago
  Yea this is definitely a setup issue. Everything looks soft in his DSLR scans, probably an issue with the depth of field. I used to DSLR-scan 6x8 medium format and while it was a major PITA the results were phenomenal [1,2]. With stitching and a high enough magnification you can easily pull up to 800 Megapixels or more out of medium format frames. Without a 1:1 magnification (while the lens was able to magnify 1:1, my setup wasn't able to accomodate the focus distance adequately so I was more in the ballpark of 1:1.8 or 1:2) I was able to stitch frames into 300+ Megapixel images with about 16 or 20 individual images making up the mosaic. The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time. If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you. Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size. 1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1677743856-3.jpg https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1... Here's one taken as a single frame with the Sony DSLR without any stitching. 2: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1680340636-0.jpg https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...
  - egorfine 2y ago
    These are excellent results (albeit files are slightly overly compressed). Thank you for the insights! > high-quality light table What light source did you use? > Lightroom worked best for stitching Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).

123 points by williamsmj 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

Nikon CoolScan devices work flawlessly with SANE on modern linux btw.

WWLink 2y ago
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!
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  In general, if there aren't Image Capture drivers, then older, largely 32-bit scan software won't work on Catalina or newer. It's kind of a gamble, and you sometimes have to manually run the device file from the image capture directory to get it to properly load the driver. I remember the only challenge getting my TMA flatbed scanner working with Ubuntu Studio in 2010 was downloading an extra xsane package.

zeristor 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
I feel like you could totally emulate though, with enough effort
yamanawabi 2y ago
I can run Nikon Scan on an XP VM or use VueScan which is modern and has a complete feature set
jrockway 2y ago
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.

physhster 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
Some fujifilm cameras support it seedms: https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_usage/ftp_upload/index.html#ftp_setting https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x-h2_connection/overview_.... Overall this seems better suited for tethered shooting with direct usb-c transfer.

flimsypremise 2y ago

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 2y ago
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...
- jnovek 2y ago
  B&Ws also scan poorly on it if the negatives are even a little bit dense. Tricky negatives that could still produce good images in the darkroom had no hope on the LS-2000.

kkukshtel 2y ago

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 2y ago
It actually exists. It’s called Plustek Opticfilm 120, though not particularly low cost, and I have one for sale.

BuildTheRobots 2y ago

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 2y ago
+1000 for VueScan. And they have perpetual licensing -- take that, Adobe.
- msisk6 2y ago
  My current Vuescan license is from 1999. And I think that one was just to replace an older serial due to some upgrade on their end. It's probably the most bang for the buck of any software I've actually purchased. I don't do much scanning anymore, but I do have an ancient Nikon CoolScan 35mm scanner that's probably at least 20 years old now. I get it out every few years to scan something I found and, with Vuescan, it still works remarkably well. Although the last time I fetched it out from a storage container by our barn (I really should store it in the house) I found the negative strip scanner wasn't working anymore, but the slide adapter did and that was good enough for the task at hand.

trwhite 2y ago

Film photography just became prohibitively costly for me around ~2018. When a roll of 120 was costing £20/25 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

jnovek 2y ago
I shoot cheap color film (and have for almost 20 years) because I like the conspicuous grain pattern. Likewise I shoot quite a bit of 5222 which I develop in rodinal.
actionfromafar 2y ago
Black and white film is still dirt cheap. Even colour film isn't that expensive now, adjusted for inflation.
positus 2y ago
Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.
- trwhite 2y ago
  A SINGLE roll of Portra 400 120 here in the UK is £15 or about $19. I remember when you could buy 5 rolls for that. It's insane
trwhite 2y ago
Talking to myself but... I just don't understand the downvotes on my comment. Saying cheap film is shit offends people? It's still shit. Get over it.

phony-account 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
jeffbee 2y ago
I'm curious about this adapter since I've never seen a single-stage USB-C to FireWire.
- Clamchop 2y ago
  Yeah I did this for a DV cam and needed two adapters: USB C to the old DisplayPort form of Thunderbolt, and then that to Firewire. And even that wasn't complete, because I needed to adapt to the smaller Firewire port on the camera. Obviously they could make a single stage adapter but I didn't find it if it exists.

__mharrison__ 2y ago

30 seconds of searching reveals there are Linux drivers for the Nikon LS-2000. Seems a lot easier to deal with (and probably more stable).

egorfine 2y ago

I am looking at his DSLR vs scanner pictures and I cannot believe my eyes. Do DSLR "scans" of film really look that bad or the author has done a suboptimal scan with the camera?

kataklasm 2y ago
Yea this is definitely a setup issue. Everything looks soft in his DSLR scans, probably an issue with the depth of field. I used to DSLR-scan 6x8 medium format and while it was a major PITA the results were phenomenal [1,2]. With stitching and a high enough magnification you can easily pull up to 800 Megapixels or more out of medium format frames. Without a 1:1 magnification (while the lens was able to magnify 1:1, my setup wasn't able to accomodate the focus distance adequately so I was more in the ballpark of 1:1.8 or 1:2) I was able to stitch frames into 300+ Megapixel images with about 16 or 20 individual images making up the mosaic. The key to great DSLR scanning is a proper, high-quality light table (I built my own) and a high quality macro lens (high quality != expensive). Adobe Lightroom always worked best for stitching, Adobe Photoshop and others had some issues for some reason. Cleaning dust off as much as possible before taking the mosaic images is vital to reduce post-processing time. If you've got a good workflow and don't have to scan hundreds of frames a week it's a great process that's a great deal cheaper, gives better results than even drumscanning if done properly and can be faster than having a lab scan it for you. Here's an example of a 6x8 DSLR scan. Taken with a 20MP Sony DSLR with 60mm (90mm FF equiv) macro lens by Tamron. Downsampled to 13MP image resolution from the 300+MP scan mosaic because that original mosaic file was about half a gigabyte in size. 1: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1677743856-3.jpg https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1... Here's one taken as a single frame with the Sony DSLR without any stitching. 2: https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1680340636-0.jpg https://bear-images.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/marius-1...
- egorfine 2y ago
  These are excellent results (albeit files are slightly overly compressed). Thank you for the insights! > high-quality light table What light source did you use? > Lightroom worked best for stitching Time to blow dust from my Autopano Pro license! (Yes, it still works on macOS 15.1 on Apple Silicon).