Epson Perfection

Recently I scanned all 1,100 rolls of film that my father and I took, for a total of 31,600 frames. For the 35mm film I used a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED, and for the medium format rolls I used an Epson Perfection 2480 photo scanner (flatbed). I had purchased these scanners about 20 years ago, but they are still going strong and produce great quality scans. They are slow and require manually feeding each strip of film; every frame takes about a minute to scan and process, especially if you enable filtering to enhance image quality. The Epson is also great at scanning prints, although I had negatives for most of what I scanned so I didn't need to scan many prints. After scanning everything, my endgame was to look through all the images, copy the best into a separate folder, crop and edit them, and produce a book. I made a dozen copies of the book and mailed them to all my relatives. The original negs are stored safely away, and I have a hard drive (with multiple backups) available in the event somebody wants me to send them a scan. Long story short, I would take the time to do it manually. Even with an automated scanner, the chances of things going wrong is fairly high, especially if your prints vary greatly in size and condition (bends, warps, etc.). Yes, it is a ton of work, but the end results are worth it. If 10+ seconds per photo is too much for you, just bite the bullet and send them out to a scanning service.

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.

I’ve been using an inexpensive Epson V600, I think I paid under $300 and it came with a license for the scanning software which was another $50-$100 value. I also got $25 anti newton ring inserts. The process is SLOW but the quality I think is excellent unless you need to print XL and show your work at MOMA.

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.

I scanned a lot of 35mm film, of various kinds, using a high-end flatbed scanner (EPSON V700 Photo). The biggest problem is not the optical quality, but mechanics: flatbeds can only scan strips. And if your film is very old and has been stored in a roll, you might not want to cut it, and even if you do, getting the strips to stay flat is nearly impossible. I tried various fancy holders, but in the end decided that I'll likely have to make my own holder from aluminum or steel sheet metal. And even then you run into the problem of lengthwise curvature. For those that are unaware of the problem with this, these scanners have a very limited depth of field, in the range of 1mm or less. So if your film is bent, some of it will always be out of focus. I can't see much on this fancy webpage, because they made it so fancy that some of the images do not load and those that do load are oh so mysteriously dark. But if their scanner can scan both heavily curved rolls and strips, I will be buying it. As to optical quality, if you can get your film to stay flat, this is a solved problem, that Epson mentioned above can produce fantastic results (more pixels that you want, generally).