My scanning journey has been an evolving beast over the past ten years of film shooting. My first scanner was a Canoscan LIDE which could only scan prints, not negatives, and it wasn’t long before I moved to a proper negative scanning solution in the form of an Epson V550 flatbed. The flatbed was ok for a starting point: not too expensive and the results were much better than from a scan of a lab print, but over time I became dissatisfied with the scans – there was a slight mushiness to them that I knew could be improved upon.

So I upgraded. The next machine was a Plustek 8100 35mm scanner. This didn’t have the ability to scan medium format (I still use a flatbed for that job for now, although using a V850 these days), but marked a noticeable improvement in scan quality over the V550. Gone was the mushiness, and a higher usable resolution of 3600dpi meant more detail could be drawn from my negatives. The Plustek required manual intervention, with each frame having to be pushed into the scanner in the film holder, but this wasn’t a problem and the scans were pretty quick.

It was at this point that I became dissatisfied with the colours I could achieve from home scanning and, for a while, I resorted to getting lab scans for colour film. This led to a parallel journey in conversion software as I attempted to find a solution that would give me the coulours I desired. Eventually I decided on Negative Lab Pro, which I’ve used ever since and which, the odd film stock or tricky frame aside, produces results I’m happy with.

The Plustek continued to serve me well until I began to notice a slight softness at one side of the scanned frames. This is very subtle, and perhaps most people would neither notice nor care, but once I saw it, it couldn’t be unseen, and (after unsuccessfully trying to resolve the issue) the itch to find another solution began.

Next came a Reflecta (Pacific Imaging to my friends across the Atlantic) – a Proscan 10T. This had a higher effective resolution over the Plustek – 4000dpi this time – plus a higher DMAX to garner some additional detail in the shadows. This scanner can produce really nice results but it’s not user friendly – on the surface it works similarly to the Plustek with a film holder that is slid into the scanner one frame at a time but, where the Plustek clicks nicely into place when the frame is properly positioned, the Reflecta 10T required you to look through a small window on the top of the device and position the frame by eye. After a while you get a feel for the correct positioning, but there are many times where you have to keep re-previewing the image to avoid cropping one edge or the other. The scanner (or mine, at least) is incredibly slow – sometimes taking over 10 minutes to scan a single frame! But there was another issue with my scanner… Banding.

On areas with low contrast areas – usually skies – faint but noticeable banding can be seen on the scan. It’s not an issue at all on busy scenes, where it is effectively camouflaged, or (for some reason I’ve not worked out) colour scans, where the banding doesn’t seem to occur at all. But I shoot a lot of black and white film, and a lot of those feature the sky, so the dissatisfaction resurfaced once more.

So the search for something better began again. The only real options available to me were a used small professional scanner such as a Nikon Coolscan model, or the world of DSLR scanning solutions. The Nikons get very good word of mouth, but the better models are expensive and are all at least twenty years old, meaning there’s always the risk of them conking out or needing specialist maintenance or repair so, while it wasn’t off the cards, I felt DSLR scanning might be a better choice and is the route I’ve taken.

I’ll reveal my setup tomorrow..

As I always post a picture in these posts, here’s an old image I’ve re-scanned with the new setup. It’s perhaps not the most exciting image, but it’s the sort of thing I’m glad to have photographed as this scene no longer exists, this street having been re-developed over the past few years (the picture is nearly 10 years old). You can see how it looks today (or on the last occasion the Google Maps car drove past) here.

Olympus 35 RC & Agfa Vista Plus 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 13 September 2016