August 9, 2018

Who knew scanning film could be such a long process! Mukul and I have a Canon CanoScan 9000F, which does a decent job. The only problem is it creates a lot of scan lines, which isn’t worth the time to remove. So, we end up thinking about buying a more expensive scanner but we got to reading some articles online and found that many people scan their film with their digital camera. Apparently, it is an excellent way to get good quality, high-res files of your film. We tried this method and purchased an LED light called, Cricut bright pad, to backlight the film. I place a strip of film on the LED and realize that my film isn’t flat enough so I go and buy two glass pieces to flatten my film. What I get once I start scanning, are multiple colored repeating oval-like patterns, which we research and discover to find are called Newtonian rings, which is formed due to moisture in between

the glass. Also, the light from the LED has created a lot of flare showing up

in camera around the edges of the film. We do some further research and find that to get rid of the Newtonian rings, you need to place the film on

anti-Newton glass. Even if we do that, it still doesn’t change the fact that

the colors are way off coming from the Nikon D810 scans.

The colors are not as accurate since we are getting the digital represented colors and not the actual film colors. Because of that, it takes more time in post to get the colors right.

A month of scanning later, Mukul surprises me with an Epson V850 Pro! It’s like he read my mind because scanning my film has become such a long and arduous process. And as you can guess, the Epson had the best results with the least amount of headache compared to the Canon CanoScan 9000F and the D810. It doesn’t give scan lines, offers higher resolution than the D810, has colors that are more spot on, and it gives a much higher dynamic range than either of the two previous methods. The only thing we didn’t like about it is that all the 120 film holders for this scanner can fit only two 6x7s in it at a time making it more time consuming to scan all the film. The CanoScan 9000F film holder could fit three. We also tried using that film holder to scan but VueScan, the software we use to process the film, just doesn’t want to work with it. The issue we have is only for those who shoot a lot of 6x7 medium format film and for those that do, it may not even be that big of a deal. Aside from that, it really is the best option we’ve had out of the three.

Here are some comparisons among the three methods we experimented with: