Props: Canon A-1, sheet of negatives
About a year ago, I started shooting film.
It's been a blast - I've had a lot of fun, I've taken a lot of cool photos, and I've been able to learn about all kinds of neat mechanical and chemical technology in the process.
Now, while I'm intending to talk about my camera collection and the stuff I do with it in future videos, I'm here today to talk about what's really a weak link in the modern analog process: digitization.
Here's the basic problem: Once you're done shooting and developing your film, you get these: hold up negatives
Negatives. Or maybe slides. But I mostly shoot print film, so I'm gonna talk about negatives.
These are simply little tiny images on a strip of plastic with the colors reversed.
Now, traditionally, as part of an all-analog process, what you'd do next is contact-print these negatives to get essentially a physical thumbnail grid of positive images, select the photos you like, and then make enlargements on photographic paper to get your full-size prints.
Technology Connections has an excellent video on this process if you'd like to see what that looks like.
Then, you'd have to physically go around and show your prints to people who are interested in your work.
And, see, that's kind of a problem for me right now, since most of the people who are interested in what I'm shooting only see me online.
I'd have to make copies and send them through the mail or something.
Now, I do actually have all the equipment I'd need to do that for black-and-white 35mm negatives, and in fact I have done so a couple times in the past just to see what it's like.
However, I don't currently have a color darkroom set up, my enlarger tops out at 6x6 medium format, and in any case I think it would be a lot more convenient to take those analog photos and send them through the same channels I already use for communication and digital images.
One way to do this would be to scan my enlargements using a flatbed scanner, but I'd rather go a step further and "move to digital" directly from the negatives.
That way, I can work with color film, I can see all my photos full-size on my screen immediately, I can edit the photos in ways that would be impossible in the darkroom, I can print them on my really nice digital printer, I can have digital copies for archival purposes, and, most importantly, I can post them on Twitter.
And, well, over the past year or so, I've been learning that scanning film is really hard.
I now own three different film scanners, plus some equipment for re-photographing film using my digital camera, and I really don't think any of them is a complete, high-quality solution that fits my desired workflow.
However, my most recent attempt at obtaining air quotes "a good film scanner" actually gave me some insight into why that perfect solution doesn't really exist, so that's what I'm gonna talk about.
Props: Plustek OpticFilm 7200, Epson V600, Canon EOS 40D with macro lens
Here are the three scanners I've used in the past.
Since I'll be doing some informal comparisons here, let's talk about what makes a good film scaner.
In my experience, there are three important factors: resolution, color rendering, and user experience.
Resolution is simple (okay, no, it's actually really complicated): it's the number of pixels in the output image, or, more accurately, the number of pixels you can shrink that output image to without losing detail, since some manufacturers slightly or even egregiously pad their resolution numbers.
Color rendering - note, that's color rendering, not color accuracy - is the character of the colors in the output when you scan color negative film.
Turning a color negative back into a positive is always a matter of interpretation.
In the darkroom, that's done by your particular photographic paper, development process, and enlarger settings, plus any dodging and burning or other manipulation you do with the print.
In a digital process, that interpretation's done by your film scanner, any edits you make directly in Photoshop, Lightroom, or similar software, and any "automatic" processing you let the scanner or computer perform on your behalf.
Since I don't really enjoy spending lots of time tweaking settings in Lightroom, I want a scanning workflow that directly produces images that I think look good.
And, finally, there's the user experience of actually operating the scanner.
That's stuff like "how fast is it", "how easy is it to load the film", and "what's the software interface like".
Anyways, let's look at these scanners.
gesture to Plustek This one is a Plustek OpticFilm 7200.
It scans a single 35mm frame at a time, and it's complete garbage. It sucks. I'm only putting this in the video to remind everyone watching that if you see one of these cheap on eBay, they're cheap for a reason.
After I put a few rolls of film through that, I decided I hated it to bits and wanted to use literally anything else, so I bought this Epson Perfection V600 Photo.
As you might be able to tell from the size, this is actually an 8.5x11" document scanner that's also capable of scanning film.
It'll do twelve frames of 35mm at once, or up to 22 centimeters of 120 film, and the overall user experience and color accuracy is much better than the Plustek.
However, where the V600 really falls apart is effective resolution.
While technically its image sensor is capable of 6,400 DPI, the optical system that transfers light from the film to the sensor is only capable of the equivalent of about 1,600 DPI.
And that's a problem because, in my opinion, 1,600 DPI really isn't enough.
That's only about 3.3 megapixels from a 35mm frame, and while I don't know where the exact upper limit for scan resolution should be, it's a whole lot more than that.
Everything coming out of this scanner just looks soft, and I can easily find more detail in the negatives using a loupe.
Also, the film holders this thing comes with are offensively difficult to load.
They're these little flimsy plastic things and you really just have to fight with them to get the film in and it's just a massive pain every time I want to use it.
So then the third option I've tried is this: hold up 40D a digital camera.
The lens on there is a Sigma high-speed macro lens, which produces an incredibly sharp, undistorted image, and it's capable of focusing close enough to fill the camera's sensor with a single 35mm frame.
Heck, I even use this to scan 110 film with a short extension tube.
Now, in terms of resolution, it's hard to beat DSLR scanning, the color quality is acceptable, and with the right setup it's possible to scan very quickly.
However, there are still some problems.
First, I've found DSLR scanning to be sort of inconsistent.
Lighting the entire film frame evenly is difficult, especially with frame sizes larger than 35mm, and it's very sensitive to variations in setup and ambient lighting.
Also, to scan larger negatives at high resolution, I have to photograph small sections of the frame and stitch them together on the computer, which is tedious, difficult, and error-prone.
I also can't take advantage of a feature found on some scanners, including the V600, called infrared cleaning or "Digital ICE", which is used to digitally remove dust from color film by scanning it in the near-infrared range as well, since color film is transparent to infrared light but dust isn't.
Props: Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED, PowerBook G4 (powered up and connected)
B camera over-the-shoulder (maybe put some clips of setting the camera up in)
So here's my latest attempt.
This is a Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED, and it's a professional-grade 35mm scanner from 2003.
(Nikon also made a Super Coolscan 8000 ED, which is like this scanner except it's larger and therefore capable of scanning medium-format film, but the 4000 is significantly easier to find at a good price. I figured I'd try it out first.)
And, well, I really thought it was going to be the answer to my problems.
Unlike the rest of these solutions, it was made when color negative film was still the king of image quality, and its technical specs are quite impressive.
This scanner runs at 4,000 DPI, the optics actually support that, it uses a 14-bit analog to digital converter, and it's capable of handling extremely dense negatives, scanning in infrared, and, with the right accessories, scanning an entire roll of 35mm film automatically. I'm serious. You just put the end of the roll in, hit scan, and come back later.
And the output quality is nuts! Now, I'm no Lightroom wizard, admittedly, but with the original Nikon software set on automatic I'm getting results right off the scanner that are better than what I get with VueScan and half an hour of editing, and the resolution is about on par with what I can do with the digital camera. I'll put some comparisons up on the screen.
However, there is, again, a huge problem with using this scanner in my ideal hybrid workflow: It slow!
You may have noticed that the laptop I have it hooked up to here is... not exactly what we would call "modern".
It's a Apple PowerBook G4, early 2003, and it's got an absolute monster of a single 867 MHz PowerPC G4 CPU.
On this computer, scanning a single 35mm frame with the 4000 takes five or ten minutes, and this is one of the faster machines this scanner was designed to be used with.
Here, let's take a look at what using this is like.
First, you load the film strip into the scanner.
Then, you select the frames you're interested in - here, I'm just going to scan frame 2 - and hit "preview".
start phone stopwatch
Then, you wait. It'll scan the frame, process it, and finally show you a little tiny preview window.
I'll set the crop, and hit "scan".
And now I'm going to wait some more.
Eventually, it'll get done with the image acquisition, but we're not out of the woods yet since it has to post-process the image too.
On the 867 MHz single-core CPU.
And, for the cherry on top, it'll take a good ten seconds to save that file to disk too.
So overall it's taken us [number] minutes to scan that picture.
Now repeat that for thirty-five more frames.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and insult your intelligence by implying this is the fastest computer you can get with a FireWire port, and in fact I've also tried this scanner with my ThinkPad T410, which knocks it down to a minute or two per frame (on par with my other scanners), but the software support is extremely flaky.
That is: if you do not select exactly the right scan settings and then attempt a scan, it will hang, and the only thing you can do about it is hard-reboot the entire machine and try something else. The original software only runs on 32-bit Windows and PowerPC Mac OS, and while I've attempted to use the scanner with VueScan on a modern system, that caused other problems, and I can't get that really nice color rendering the Nikon software's capable of.
I suspect a lot of this is down to the scanner being picky about FireWire hardware. I've heard the Coolscan 8000 actually came with a FireWire card it was known to work with, and while I'm sure I could fire the parts cannon and find something that worked eventually, I really just don't want to.
However, what confused me about all of this is that this experience I've had using the 4000 with this PowerBook had to have been everyone's experience with it when it was new.
In fact, I was able to find some contemporary reviews of the device that basically boiled down to "image quality is great, but it sure takes its time getting there", which confused me, because, from my modern perspective, the scanning speed on this thing is almost a deal-breaker.
It takes up to four hours to scan a 36-frame roll, which, okay, with the roll-at-a-time adapter that's not the end of the world, but it sure does make it a lot harder to do that workflow where I scan the whole roll in and look at it on the computer.
Then I later realized that it probably didn't matter to the people who were using this device in 2003.
See, scanning a whole roll at 4,000 DPI, color, uncompressed produces close to four gigabytes of data - almost an entire DVD - and, in fact, this laptop is barely even capable of displaying those images! I don't think there was anything useful a hobbyist could do with that much picture in the early 2000s, and, sure enough, if you're okay with compromising on resolution or color depth, this thing gets a whole lot faster.
Scanning with the intent to produce JPEGs you can reasonably download over DSL is no problem at all for this machine, and I have to imagine that's how most of them were actually used, or if someone did want high-resolution scans out of it, they probably only wanted one or two, and they already knew which frames they wanted to scan because they got 4x6 prints back when they had the film developed.
And eventually I realized that's why there's no magic bullet for cheap, high-quality bulk film scanning: nobody's ever wanted to do it!
Back in the day, there was nothing practical you could do with the resulting data - you could fit a whole ten rolls worth of scans on this thing's hard drive - and nowadays most film scanning seems to be done by professional photographers, who can pay photo labs to use scanners that are completely out of reach of the hobbyist budget, or by people "trying to digitize Grandpa's old slide collection" who maybe don't have exacting image quality requirements. There's nothing available in this space because it's not a space, and it never was.
Props: All the film scanners!
So, what's the point? Why am I up here telling you about all this?
Well, one reason is because I'm incredibly mad at all of these devices; they have put me through hell recently, and I'm using the power of videography to bring you here with me.
But more than that, I think it's an interesting look into, really, the history of digital photography!
As someone who doesn't remember a time before the modern digital workflow where you pull a thousand 20 megapixel images into Lightroom and sort through them there, I find it wild that there kind of wasn't a transition period where you could do that with your film photos, and it probably went the other way where you were mostly doing a traditional film process but the last step was "scan" instead of "wet print".
And, of course, it's a reminder to any retro-tech nerds out there that it's important to understand the context old devices - and especially old hardware peripherals - existed in.
As far as my own film scanning adventure goes, I think this is about the end of it.
I've still got some loose ends - perhaps I'll find a good deal on a Coolscan 8000, try one of the higher-end Epson flatbeds, or hit it big and buy a drum scanner - but I think it's likely I'll just put up with the 4000 being a little slow, and the V600 really does get enough detail out of my medium-format shots. It's probably better to slow down anyways.
Well, if you made it this far, thanks for watching. Obviously, I'm just starting to find my way here on YouTube, and I'd like to say you should subscribe if you'd like to see more of this, but, truth be told, I'm not completely sure what I'll do next. Leave a comment if you've got an idea, and I'll see you next time.