Years ago I bought a Nikon Coolscan V to scan in all of my parents' old 110 slides. I would have loved a solution like this at the time, although that worked well (and way better than I thought) and the price ended up reasonable. I wish scanners like that were still made.
This is cool. I was recently thinking about how to scan in a lot of family slides from the 60s, 70s, and 80s and now I think I want to build one of these to streamline the capture process...
My previous plan was to just set up a projector in a dark room and photograph off the big screen manually with my DSLR (I thought this might also work for 8mm film reels as well).
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.
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.:
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.
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.
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
> 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
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
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
Here's an old httrack image of the page I had documenting the process: https://nuxx.net/wiki_archive/A/110_Slide_/_35mm_Negative_Sc...
Unfortunately it's not really repeatable as these scanners command quite a high price used and are fairly hard to come by.