Stick to my Nikon scanner until this comes down in $
replies(1):
A second hand DSLR setup is going to be roughly the same price or less. I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers. If you want fancy and experimental, filmomat has arguably a more interesting but pricier offering.
But naysaying aside, I hope they manage to find a niche that allows them to survive as a company, and keep the analog photography revival alive.
> “Is Knokke open, repairable, and long-term supported?”
> “Absolutely. We're committed to building a scanner that lasts decades. All schematics and repair manuals will be publicly available, replacement parts can be purchased directly, and the software will remain supported for as long as possible.”
With that said, I'm happy to see new film products released in 2025/2026. Hopefully this is just the first at-bat.
(I have submitted it earlier but no traction)
Is there such a thing as a cheap drum scanner.
And if you get one with Pixel Shift, you can get way higher resolutions than the 22MP they're offering (e.g. my cheapo Olympus gets 40MP JPEG or 64MP RAW from a 16MP sensor.)
I'm both amazed and really pleased to see anyone attempting to launch a totally new scanner in 2025, and genuinely hoping the actual scans are really made at the resolution and color-depth claimed in the text: too many recent scanners are simply upscaled, lower bit-depth devices marketed with exaggerated specs.
I also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000, so I'm not immediately in the market for this. But I don't expect the Coolscan to last forever, and the Firewire connections on the machine are already abandoned by Apple, who chose not to support the cables in their latest Operating System - so eventually I won't be able to connect it to a new computer.
Am I missing something or is this supposed to be in another tier of image quality?
For example I wanted to look at the first picture in the horizontal gallery that scrolls horizontally when you scroll vertically. However, there is no way for me to view the whole image. Either it is cutoff at the bottom, or it starts horizontally scrolling. Switching from vertical to horizontal scrolling is awkward and I just want to skip the gallery.
scrolling on that page feels slow, sluggish, and if you switch to spacebar, you actually miss significant content since it only loads/becomes visible halfway into the page.
Like others have said, dust is a huge issue. Some film labs cut film into short strips. some film is just a single image (for example if previously cut to fit into slides).
The film is designed to form into a coil. So, if there's grit or any hard material you'll end up with scratches on the negative itself.
--is it only 35mm as well? I don't think I see any mention of formats it supports. So I can only assume it's just 35mm.-- EDIT: found the 120mm section in the FAQ.
> 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.
Did they not research the competition?
I can buy a brand-new 7200 (virtual) DPI machine with infrared, proper color metering, wide software support, and multi-exposure system for $400, less than half the price of this offering.
It also supports slides and single frames, whereas this has a min. of 3 in a strip.
I'm sure this will be on every photography youtuber's channel shortly, can't wait to see it in action.
IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.
Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.
But it was painfully slow.
This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.
Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.
It's expensive compared to digital for snapshots, but if you enjoy working in the darkroom as a hobby, you can probably get everything you need for free or cheap.
Epson stopped making their flatbeds that do film, reportedly because they can’t get the CCDs anymore. That may be a rumor.
The result is they go for 2x MSRP on eBay for models that are many years old. Because that’s all that exists.
Without that, you can buy the kind of scanner meant for a photo lab ($$$$$), DIY it with a DSLR ($$$ if you don’t have one), or pay your a lab a lot per roll and hope they do a good job.
I’m not saying it’s a giant market but it certainly seems to me like there’s enough of one that it could support a small product.
You can get brand new Plustek OpticFilm scanners for 35mm and smaller starting around $300, and there are plenty of other options above that. Plus the DIY.
I’m sure 35mm is easier to make and certainly a bigger market but it’s also a lot more crowded.
I expect their specs are far better than the $300 one I’ve mentioned, I don’t know enough to know. But medium format people are desperate for anything.
I would love a new scanner for 21st century but there just no way anyone serious is trading CCD (or PMT if you got the cash) for CMOS.
But I applaud the initiative and will definitely buy it to try but not to keep.
35mm film and 120 film are a similar cost per roll, but with 35mm you get 36 exposures vs 8-16 exposures on 120 film (6x12 and 6x4, with square 6x6 in the middle at 12 exposures). And if you shoot half-frame, the cost/shot really goes in the 35mm direction.
That said, I have a handful of of 35mm cameras (all fixed lens vintage rangefinder) and a post-war Zeiss Super Ikonta IV (6x6 120 format). The Olympus 35DC is my favorite of the bunch - it's automatic except focus - really sharp and fast lens - just a pleasure to use. And a Polaroid Go 2 because it's just dumb fun (way overpriced for the quality, and sensible people buy Instax cameras instead, but the Polaroid form-factor was just too much for me to pass up).
I shoot film because it makes me slow down and think a bit. With my mirrorless cameras, I'm too prone to spray and pray and sorting through hundreds of shots can kill the fun for me. That, and the film look is nostalgic for me - sometimes I just want rough snapshots - feels more like a memory vs the crystal clear high res digital output.
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).
https://web.archive.org/web/20251111210606/https://www.soke....
PS to add more - I am unable to scroll, all I see is the picture with the dark background. If I use arrow keys instead of the touchpad, I can scroll a bit then after a second or so the page snaps back to the top. I have Firefox on MacOS.
(I know the HN rules say that we should focus on the contents rather than criticising the technical aspects of a website, but in this case the contents are not accessible).
for just contact sheet fast … you can just move and push the blue tooth button … for one particular treasure slow … you can do pixel shift and focus stacking …
The results are good, as you'd expect. However can I tell the difference between that and me putting the negatives on a decent softbox and using a fancy camera to take a picture? yes, but not by much.
I think the main issue is film registration, that is getting the film to be flat and "co-planar" to the lens so the whole frame is sharp.
My negatives are slightly warped, so they really need a frame to make sure they are perfectly flat. But for instagram, they are close enough.
However scanning more than a few pictures is a massive pain in the arse. If I was scanning film regularly, then this is what I'd want, and its cheaper than the competition.
Assuming that its actually any good, I haven't seen any scans yet.
Ilford Delta 400 pushed two stops to 1600 ASA in a 1970s Asahi Pentax SP1000 was always going to produce… artistic results, requiring as much imagination as acuity to appreciate the subject. (Read: see past the blur.)
Software could also use some improvement. Automating batch correction and clean up should be easier, IMO.
That has also been superseded in the digital realm. I can use a top DSLR from the last decade to blow film medium format cameras away under most conditions, especially in low light. If I just use a digital medium format camera, it invalidates almost any rationale for film medium format (there is a minor, minor argument to be made about depth of field when the lens is wide open).
Large format can squeeze slightly more resolution out of an image, but the ability to actually use that extra resolution is rarely satisfied. Again, a MF digital subs in for almost every conceivable use case.
The reality is that people do this because it is fun, or a challenge, or for a feeling. Basically, its interesting. The technical excellence of the 'end result' is secondary.
There's tons of things that people do that don't make sense from a purely pragmatic point of view, and that's what makes the world so much more fun to live in.
https://shootitwithfilm.com/what-are-newtons-rings-and-how-t...
https://jackw01.github.io/scanlight/
(NB: Most film I shoot is slide film, which I’ve been told doesn’t benefit from RGB light sources because it’s intended viewing was projected with a broad-spectrum white light [likely a warmer than daylight (but color temperature isn’t much of a concern for digitizing slides)] so I haven’t dug into this much.)
Wow, you weren’t kidding, I completely missed this. I bought one, sold it, then bought and currently own another. I better baby it, there’s really nothing like it out there.
Seems about as credible as a lot of the crowdfunded stuff.
https://store.waveformlighting.com/collections/led-strips/pr...
Negative Supply use something similar in their light tables, though I don't know exactly what the source or spectrum is. They're highly regarded enough that I think it's not an issue.
You can also use LEDs for enlarging, but you need to be careful about buying the right bands for the paper. I've used Luxeon SunPlus with some success as you can buy the correct green/blue for the different contrast layers. Though for B&W, even a random 5500K module from Cree worked quite well.
I think the product would be more compelling and worth it or even a good deal at the price they are offering if it offered drum scan-quality for larger formats.
However, a Bayer-filtered sensor has lower color resolution, since each pixel only sees one color. So the pixel shift really helps quite a bit here since the sensor (and Bayer array) are shifting relative to the film multiple times per exposure.
High-quality film scanners maintain color resolution by using linear sensors without Bayer filtering. But they’re slow and expensive.
https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/...
I don't care how cool your scanner looks or how "modern" the workflow is - it's samples or nothing. Additionally, if they were really smart, they'd collaborate with a well known film photographer instead of using someone's walk-around point-and-shoot photos.
Then it’ll do a 16 or 32 shot stack in order to do the same thing but with more resolution.
Are there any sample images
Any suggestions for a scanner meant for bulk scans of old family photos (think a few thousand images)? I bought, what I thought, was a reasonably solid scanner, the Pacific Image Powerfilm scanner but the software is so janky that it hangs every two strips and has to be restarted making the entire process super labor intensive. Also the entire "bulk feature" where it's meant to pull the strips one at a time iis not even close to working.
I’ll also note that negative lab pro hates negatives that are scanned with it. They don’t turn out at all. If you’re using it, you should expect to be inverting them manually, which is kind of a pain. I was quietly hoping (but not expecting) to still see some of the benefits of it when passing them through NLP.
It can do 36 exposures but you have to cut them into strips and place them in a carrier but it isn't terrible and if you store your negs in film protectors you are cutting them down anyway.
I am fairly sure the newest version (V850) is the same but be aware they aren't cheap, at least $1k+ USD but still cheaper than the next level up which are pro drum scanners and they are many orders of magnitude more expensive.
The issue with LEDs, is very pure colors. That’s actually a bit of a problem, with film scanners. You need a smooth curve, and it needs to extend out a bit. You don’t want areas of color being missed.
The Coolscans had a light color response (think the “levels” screen, in Photoshop) that looked like three steep hills, with minimal overlap, but they were able to make them wider than a “pure” LED. Coherence is a feature of LED lighting.
Most previous light sources used filters over a white light, and they looked “sloppier,” with a lot more overlap, so there was more coverage. We had to correct for the unusual color coverage of LEDs.
2. Time is money, but who is honestly shooting that much 135 film that it's worth 1600 Euros to buy a faster scanner for it? I don't think a museum wants to feed degraded film through a fast scanner, and surely pros who still shoot film would use a larger format, since that's where it has some differences / advantages compared to digital?
And yeah, workflow is the thing that seems the worst. That seems like a great place to try to improve things to get a sale.
For most films, anything beyond 4000 DPI is just going to help resolve the grain particles or dye cloud shapes. You have to be shooting slow fine grained BW with the best lenses to need more.
Option 1 is to get an Epson Perfection series flatbed scanner. V800 or V850. This approach is highly automated and you get automatic dust correction with color film. But, leading software packages don't support Linux, and the quality for 35mm negatives is just okay. Performance on medium and large format is SOTA.
Option 2 is to assemble a scanning rig with a DSLR and a light table. This approach is fiddly and requires a lot of space, but with some tuning, the 35mm scan quality can beat flatbeds.
There are some other, more obscure approaches, like vintage Minolta and Nikon scanners, but unless you have a PC with a parallel port laying around, you're gonna have a hell of a time getting those working.
None of these options are good, and if this thing can really perform, I'd happily drop $500+ on it.
Side note: Those little toy scanners like the Kodak branded ones on Amazon are atrocious. Avoid them. If you need to scan some family photos and you don't want to break the bank, go to your local photography store. They could really use your business.
I think the problem is that it sounds like you get worse results for slide film with RGB than you get with C41 and white light. So the tradeoff is only worth it if you shoot no slide and C41.
It’s weird for me that with the advancing technology people keep coming up with higher price with an excuse of approach, design, whatever.
This seems like an overpriced piece of tech for niche connoisseurs. And I don’t like it.
> I shoot film because it makes me slow down and think a bit.
100%, because of the higher cost per shot compared to digital. The higher still cost per shot of medium/large format enhances that effect.
But these cost several thousand dollars, due to them still being relevant for contemporary professional applications. Medium format bodies can be found for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Even at $1/shot, if as a hobbyist even if you shot 4 rolls (48 shots total) in a weekend, you'd be shooting that much every weekend, every weekend straight for years before a top digital body would break even for you. And you would have more fun and a more meaningful time due to the more deliberative process.
Funny thing is, in general, low and midrange desktop scanners that public can generally buy, haven't changed much in 10-20 years since they started using led lights and IR dust removal (Canon Fare, Digital ICE or similar stuff). Some are even the same hardware just slightly rebadged or with a different USB connector. But they're the same price or more expensive.
And, at a different level, professional film scanners are EXPENSIVE. Lots of people are now scanning their film using a digital camera and led backlight (now that there is affordable good quality led lights) instead of a dedicated scanner. But that's not very fast and requires some extra manual work. If this scanner offers reasonable quality and a good workflow (that not very proprietary or closed), 1000-1500 dollars is a reasonable price, especially if you have lots of film coming in, or an old collection to scan.
I could imagine my dad buying one of this to scan his hundreds and hundreds of rolls from the 70s/80s and then selling it once he finish. It would be like 1-3 USD per rolled scanned :)
I could do that for my dad too...
Otherwise you can use a slide-copier attachment on a DSLR, taking multiple exposures if necessary to achieve whatever dynamic range you want.
I don't get it.
In the end I found a new in-box Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 II, pretty much the end of the line for film scanners. I haven't tried it yet!
This is way out of date. I have since been able to get it working on a Windows 11 4th gen Intel machine with 64-bit drivers cobbled together from a couple of versions of FlexColor and some .inf modification. It's not flawless, there's some major corruption that can occur when trying to use certain operations, but overall it works for my needs.
[Image resolution is a very complicated topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution) and megapixel count, or even lines/mm does not tell the full story.
As with many photographers, my collection consists of B&W and colour prints of various sizes and formats, 35mm B&W and colour negatives in both rolls and cut strips, 35mm slide/reversal material both in rolls and as mounted slides. Film stock covers many brands including Agfa, Ansco, Fuji, Kodak—including its Eastman movie emulsions—and others. Kodak holds special place, with Kodacolor, Ektachrome (including infrared versions) and Kodachrome. At a guess, I've have about 30,000 Kodachrome slides alone. And that's not all, I've also larger format photos, prints, B&W and colour negatives and reversal stock.
Most of this material has still not been scanned because of the challenges involved, for instance those in the know will be aware of the difficulty of scanning Kodachrome slides because of residual silver that's still in the processed emulsion. Then there are scanning difficulties, mounting various formats (slides, rolls of negatives, etc.) and technical difficulties such as focus adjustment, avoiding Newton's rings, etc. Simply, I've not been able to get the tech necessary to do what I consider an adequate job.
Restricting my comments to just 35mm I can confidently say there is NO 35mm film scanner on the market today that can do full justice to a large range of film types—except perhaps exotic and expensive drum scanners which are unavailable to the vast majority of photographers including many professionals. (Drum scanners are only found in high-end professional and technical environments, they cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars and are a damn pain to use.)
Fact is there is NO film scanner on the market today that can faithfully reproduce in digital form the full dynamic range and resolution† of old fashioned chemical film emulsions. I say 'old fashioned' because modern digital photography, HDR etc., is capable of much wider dynamic range, resolution and colour gamut than film emulsions, so it's not a technology limitation (converting the limited dynamics of old film ought to be easy but no manufacturer makes equipment that does). It's really shameful that no manufacturer has stepped in to fill this technical gap when clearly the technology is available to do so.
Below, I've kept to the basics, an in-depth comment would be much more detailed:
• Argument goes that no one would pay for a film scanner with those specifications—as its manufacture would require precision/exotic tech, and anyway it's doubtful anyone would notice the difference with currently available scanners. I question both those assumptions as I'll explain.
• Leaving drum scanners and a few very expensive ones aside, in the past the best 35mm scanners on the market were the Nikon COOLSCAN range but Nikon discontinued them some years back and nothing has equalled or replaced them since. They were not perfect but they had the best optics and overall provided the best resolution and dynamic range available of any scanner. The COOLSCAN's most significant limitation was its incredibly slow scanning speed (nothing much has changed here with the possible exception of this soke engineering device, film scanners have always had snail-like speeds for seemingly inexplicable reasons).
• Nowadays, for most photographers the best compromise between quality and usability are Plustek scanners, whilst they have neither as good a resolution nor the dynamic range of the Nikon COOLSCANs they are about the best available. I'd add neither are Plustek's mechanics for scanning films as good as the COOLSCANs (that said, in this regard the Nikons weren't much better than just adequate).
• So is there really a noticeable difference between a Plustek and a COOLSCAN? Yes there is, COOLSCANs have noticeably greater dynamic range in dark shadowy areas, and despite the Plustek having comparable resolution specifications with the Nikons the COOLSCANs produced visually sharper scans.
• Why are all film scanners so pathetically slow? A good question I cannot fully answer. Perhaps 20 or so years ago there may have been some excuse but even back then I'd argue they should have been much faster. For argument's sake even if the electronics had slewing limitations and had difficulty in processing images—which wasn't the case—then scanners could have been made much faster by simply increasing the number of rows of sensors—for example, increasing the rows from one to 10 and stepping 10 pixels at a time would increase scanning speed by 10. This is so obvious that it's mindboggling that it hasn't been incorporated into scanners previously. (Note, the other obvious option of photographing an image as does a camera has serious quality limitations.)
There's much more to say about speeding up scanners which I cannot cover here except to say have you noticed that scanners still use USB-2 and not USB3-3? Why?
• There are other significant issues that haven't been addressed adequately in many scanners such as colour calibration. For instance, every type of colour negative has a unique set of parameters often referred to as 'film terms'. In short, these parameters define how the destructive colour mask should be decoded (that's the orangy mask that's incorporated in all colour negatives). Many scanners only approximate or guess these parameters and expensive third party proprietary software such as SilverFast is needed to correct these limitations.
If I didn't know better I'd reckon the lack of a competitive range of high performance film scanners on the market was some form of conspiracy—electronics designers having an intrinsic distain for old fashioned analog film technology or such but clearly there's more to it than that. Whilst I can surmise reasons I'd only be guessing but for sure it has little to do with technical limitations.
Why the scanner crisis hasn't been a much hotter topic amongst serious photographers and professional reviewers has perplexed me. Perhaps if nothing else this scanner from soke engineering might fan the debate, it could perhaps force scanner manufacturers such as Plustek to upgrade their long-stagnant designs.
_
† Kodachrome has a resolution of 100 lines per mm which roughly equates to an image with 3600x2400 pixels (a frame being 36x24mm). Some films have even higher resolutions. Nyquist math says that the sampling rate should be doulde which means a scanner should be able to resolve to 7200 lines per frame but in practice no commonly available scanner comes anywhere near this figure. Diehards note, I'm aware this isn't a precise calculation but it'll do for argument's purpose.
personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...
"Designed by photographers, for photographers." Nice. Would love to see your pictures then.
> Would love to see your pictures then.
Without any samples it’s hard for a $999 kickstarter project, considering a Epson V750 scanner costs much less than that but already provides great quality and supports more formats
The look and the process explains film over digital.
I haven’t seen any consumer scanner that has an auto feed. Good ones have a nice sprocket wheel but you still feed manually with a wheel.
Well, as I mentioned elsewhere old fashioned Kodachrome resolves ~100 lines/mm and some newer color emulsion are considerably higher, and of course B&W ones have even higher resolutions.
Given that a 35mm frame is 36x24mm even Kodachrome achieves 8.64 megapixels. OK, let's allow for an overgenerous Kell factor of say 0.8, this figure will drop to ~6.9 megapixels. Given the ready availability of emulsions with higher resolutions, especially the best B&W ones then a figure well in excess of 5 megapixels is relizable in practice.
Of course, that doesn't take into account the image chain as a whole, lenses, displays, compression, etc. which would reduce the effective resolution. That said, these days the typical image chain can easily achieve much higher pixel throughput than 5 megapixels before bandwidth limiting so the effective Kell derating factor could easily be kept quite small.
Guess this can't improve on that lol. But by the look of it, negatives that's already cut into small strips of 4-6 frame each wont be easy to load?
I think software is the key. While the bundled one was ok to do basic stuff, figuring out stuff was complex. In the end I just used default.
I got the response curves by feeding in a special slide with a diffraction grating.
The curves were markedly different from an incandescent light source.
It's fine, sure. For the price I paid for it and the image quality I'm getting, I have no complaints. On the other hand, a new device that can cut the time down to 5 mins with modern software support (silverfast is kind of dated and VueScan will run you another 100), while priced at 1000 EUR, is not cheap, but also not that unreasonable tbh.
The custom software package is clearly in its foobar stage. Loving the word "TextLabel" surrounded by a bunch of padding.
If it only scans developed film, then it's unlikely to still be in the cannister with DX codes, and I've never seen that film delivered to a customer in a roll - it's normally cut up into strips so they can be stored flat.
Both.
> personally I think that technology has come on enough to move on from the imacon/hasselblad: https://emulsive.org/articles/opinion/scanning-film-the-20k-...
It's not - the issue that still remains is keeping the film flat, and this is especially problematic with smaller formats. With current solutions you can get the resolution but not the flatness, or you sacrifice something to get the flatness (e.g. ANR glass holders). It's the old glass vs glassless carrier debate, applied to a modern workflow.
I repeat myself: focus, DPI / resolution, dynamic range - these are the solved problems. In fact, modern medium format digital cameras are superior on all these factor. Keeping the film flat, however? Only drum scans and the Imacon "Flextight" solution do this well.
Of course, it depends on what you plan to do with the scans and for 99% of people the solution in the link above is more than good enough.
I've written about this previously https://leejo.github.io/tags/scanning/ # I'm going to add the fourth, and hopefully final, part in a couple of months time.
That's how film is developed. Someone at a lab has to cut it.
> who is honestly shooting that much 135 film
How about a film lab? A place where "uncut developed film" is extremely common.
>it's worth 1600 Euros to buy a faster scanner for it
Price is 999 euro.
> pros who still shoot film would use a larger format
Some do, some don't. It depends on the project. I'm a little surprised by your comment looking at your history. You say you're a retired professional photographer and you've never heard of "uncut developed film" before? If you're retired in 2025, you must have been working when all photography was on film. You never developed a roll of film before?
They stopped making them early this year. Only the top end model for $1500 still exists and I don’t know if that’s because they still make it or just that there is still stock left at Amazon/etc.
If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.