A modern 35mm film scanner for home

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.

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.)

Am I missing something or is this supposed to be in another tier of image quality?

> 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.

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.)

If that matters, I’m not sure.

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.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/

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

A 36Mp camera is not enough to best a 4000ppi scanner. You need about 60-70 mp to resolve the detail of a scan to similar level .

Even a layman can see the difference at 100%

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.

[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.

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-...

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.

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.