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

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.

You seem knowledgeable in this space. I’ve researched scanners for only scanning old prints but get mixed messages. What would be your advice on a scanner for this purpose to get 90% good enough… epson 650/700?

At a sane price? The Epsons.

https://epson.com/For-Work/Scanners/Photo-and-Graphics/Epson...

It has a white panel on the inside of the lid which ruins a lot of scans. I always put black card on top of my scans.

That's probably the best scanner for photos. And I used to own a $25K Hasselblad too.

Make sure you clean the platten and the photos before scanning to save hassle later on dust removal.

I used those Epsons for scanning tens of thousands of old photos.

Start with a good scan, and there is so much good post-processing software out there now to help correct fading etc on old images.

Black card is a thin cardboard , aka card stock? Can you link to something that explains the process? It’s pertinent because I’ve got a V600.