I'm done with film.

Congratulations! Ten years ago there was a valid argument for using film but with the latest ~50mp DSLR's and digital MF it does not make sense shooting film smaller than 8x10.

But, you get what you pay for, if you want to match the quality that you are use to expect to pay $2000+ and go with full frame and good glass.

I can buy an excellent medium format film camera for a few hundred $$$'s. So, for lower volumes, the film camera still makes sense.

What is a good substitute for the old Minolta Dimage Scan Dual 4 for scanning film and slide.

Want to avoid a flatbed.

What is a good substitute for the old Minolta Dimage Scan Dual 4 for scanning film and slide.

Want to avoid a flatbed.

≈

I’m trying to get Vue Scan to update a scanner to an updated desktop and updated Windows.

Real Pain in the ass every time. Multiple downloads, new shorter larger USB cable, still no workie.

Works great when it works but driver/software upgrades always a p.i.t.a.

You have a point about scanning the film though....

You could set up a fairly low spec PC running Windows XP and use that as a dedicated scanning station. Don't even connect it to the Internet. then you have no need to worry about OS upgrades and the like.

"Unless you use a vacuum platen, 8x10" paper deviates from flatness about 2 mm..."

- Que? Sounds like someone needs a better easel! Or to find the aperture control on their enlarging lens.

"Unless you use a vacuum platen, 8x10" paper deviates from flatness about 2 mm..."

 

- Que? Sounds like someone needs a better easel! Or to find the aperture control on their enlarging lens.

Back in my very primitive darkroom days, I don't think I had 2mm of variation when I was just laying 8x10s on the baseboard and printing them...I can't imagine that much using even a cheap easel.

I made thousands of prints while working for a newspaper. The easels were first rate, but easels only hold paper at the edges. The slight curl paper paper inevitably incurs is enough to cause variations in height. Negatives not quite flat and normal aberrations of lenses combine to make grain-sharpness across the entire field elusive, if not impossible.

Duh! Aperture settings. If you stop to f/11 or less you get diffraction limiting, and impractically long exposure times.

Most of the time it won't matter, but if you never look, you won't see the problem.

I have a question for you guys if I had $1,000 to spend on a scanner dedicated or flatbed what would you say the best scanner that I can get $1,000 I'm only going to be doing 120 film.

I'm thinking Epson v750 doing wet mounts or the Nikon l -8000.

I want to do some experimenting before I completely give up on this.

I have a V700 now and I have a Coolscan 8000 on lay-a-way at a local camera shop.

If you buy a Vxxx series Epson, be prepared to spend an extra $100+ on the Better Scanning film holders. I suggest getting AN glass. The included medium format holders are garbage(I've never used the 35mm strip ones, although the slide and 4x5 holders are fine). Also, the Better Scanning holders will require some tinkering to get in focus, although ultimately they are better than the Epson ones because focus is set with screws rather than a set of shims.

The Epson is certainly the more versatile of the two, but the Nikon is just plain better. Dedicated film scanner start out well ahead of flatbeds because you have fewer glass to air surfaces and the optics are optimized for scanning film.

I played with the Nikon in the shop before I agreed to buy it, and there was no question to me that even with the learning curve involved in using any new scanner(the Nikon holders are straight forward enough, but I did find them a bit fiddly to get exactly right) the quality was easily better than my Epson. That's despite the fact that, on paper, the Nikon is lower resolution.

As a side note, though, I will mention that the Nikon software is clunky but I prefer it to Vuescan(which I've also used extensively). If you are a Mac user, you MUST have a computer capable of running OS X 10.6.8 or earlier for Nikon Scan to work. You might get away with virtualizing it-I haven't tested that route-but I suspect you will take a speed hit on doing that. With the 8000 at least, you also need Firewire(IEEE 1394).

Face it, flat bed scanner technology is dead in the water. When did Epson last roll out anything truly new and improved over its previous models? They're slow and can be focused only by trial-and-error putzing around with the height of the holders.Nikon hasn't supported its old scanners for years. No parts, no service with attendant age-related OS and connection issues. Sound like fun? Not to me.

You need to look into DSLR scanning, especially for 120 negatives.

No it doesn't sound like fun and I know the results from the v700 Epson where I go to my local Photoshop and they scan my negatives I'm not impressed at all.

I think the answer is either take my negatives in print them in a dark room or move on to a digital camera.

I have no space for a darkroom at all I'm not setting up a dark room in my bathroom sticking towels under the doors I'm not doing that if I had a dedicated space I would do it I'm not going half-hearted and having to keep tearing everything down if that doesn't work for me.

The local darkroom is a good 30 minute drive it's 15 bucks a day which it's not bad but it's kind of a hassle I'd like to be able to do everything from inside my house.

I'm just getting a lot of negative in a lot of mixed results on scanners it really looks like digital just makes more sense at this time in my life I would love to set up a dark room in my house that would be my first option but it's not possible.

The current scanner situation for medium format film is dire. The only easily-available flatbeds are the Epson 700 variants, which are mediocre at best if you want scans for top-quality printing. Getting the best from MF film requires a dedicated MF film scanner: these were never all that numerous to begin with, tend to be high-strung failure-prone devices, and most of their original mfrs are long gone from the business. Unlike old cameras, there is no thriving subculture of scanner repair specialists: they are incredibly fussy, ridiculously Rube Goldberg contraptions that can take forever to troubleshoot.

The most infamous example being the Nikon CoolScan 8000 and 9000, so fragile that the mere act of shipping one (in its original box and packing) from one owner to another can irreparably damage them. Walking on a carpeted floor in the wrong shoes before touching a CoolScan 9000 risks blowing its FireWire board to kingdom come, turning it into a $3000 paperweight. Parts and service have not been available for years, and Nikon was generally AWFUL at repairing them anyway. Yet these are the scanners every film photographer and his mother are chasing, at ever-higher second hand cost (if you want to give yourself a migraine, check the asking prices for a spare Nikon 120 film tray- it would be cheaper to buy your own 3D printer and make trays yourself).

Close on Nikon's heels you have the Imacon ne Hasselblad FlexTights: the most overpriced collection of near-empty boxes with awkward footprints ever to gouge photographers. Capable of excellent results, yes, but at one heck of a cost in both cash and learning curve. The only "affordable" FlexTights are the ancient SCSI-connected models that require their own dedicated blue or gray circa 2001 Apple Mac tower. Any FlexTight with a connector recognizable by anyone under 40 is priced at the downpayment for a BMW.

The Polaroid/Artixscan 120 twins had a following for awhile, but here again are flimsy contraptions from mfrs gone like the dinosaurs. Ditto the superb Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro, arguably the finest price/performance MF film scanner ever offered: now rarer than rare, no spare parts, no service whatsoever. The only serious scanner still available new at anything approaching reasonable cost is the Plustek OpticFilm 120, but its still a bug-riddled work in progress after nearly five years on the market (each buyer becomes another guinea pig).

More and more film photographers are turning in desperation to the "scan film by re-photographing it with a high-megapixel digital camera like Nikon D850" workflow. This can work surprisingly well, but comes with its own baggage of advantages vs disadvantages. We may be approaching an era when film photography completely detaches itself from digital: you'll either have your own wet print darkroom, pay for the services of someone who does, or you won't use film at all. Color film is already such a PITA to deal with that we may regress completely to black and white. The price of new MF digital cameras like Pentax 645Z, Hasselblad X1D and Fuji GX have dropped low enough to make many of us seriously rethink the value proposition of film system + exotic pricey vintage film scanner. Smaller wonder-cams like Nikon D850 and Sony A7RIII would probably do just as well as the new MF models.

Of course, if you happen to lay hands on (and have room for) something like a Creo EverSmart professional prepress flatbed scanner, that can scan an entire roll of film with perfect colors and detail all by itself, your outlook may be sunnier. As prices for used Nikon CoolScan 9000s reach ever more absurd heights, a Creo can seem almost rational. They're 90 pound boat anchors that require an old legacy Mac workstation, but much more convenient than a drum scanner (or even a FlexTight). I'm in awe of the guys who truck an abandoned drum scanner into their garage and blithely learn to use it: wish one lived next door to me!

The only "affordable" FlexTights are the ancient SCSI-connected models that require their own dedicated blue or gray circa 2001 Apple Mac tower.

Among some of my other esoteric interests, I collect Apple Macintosh computers and a SCSI scanner isn't necessarily something that will send me running.

Up to OS X 10.4.11, SCSI "just worked" on most Macs. At the moment, I'm playing with a Nikon Coolscan III that I bought cheaply and it's running great on PowerMac G4 tower in Mac OS 9. Unfortunately, a while back I upgraded this computer to OS X 10.5.8, and the peculiarity of the CPU upgrade installed in it is that it's very difficult to install 10.4 without fitting a different CPU and then installing. That's why I'm running it on OS 9.2.2, and fortunately it really was plug and play.

At least when it comes to SCSI compatibility, I'm at a loss as to why Apple did certain things. In particular, for blue and white G3 era up to the end of the G4 towers, it was possible to order the computer with an Adaptec/PowerDomain 2930CU SCSI card. This is a great little firmware-compatible card(the PowerDomain brand is Adaptec's line of firmware compatible Mac cards) with an external LVD-50(high density Centronix) connector and an internal connector for a 50 pin ribbon cable. It's a bootable card off an internal or external drive. It's usually my card of choice for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I have bunches of them, and I'm running this Coolscan off of one at the moment. The Coolscan also uses LVD-50, so it's just one cable tying it to the card, then termination set on with the scanner(it would be more complicated if I had more devices, but I don't and even then it's just a matter of unique IDs and setting termination correctly).

For whatever reason, though, Apple pulled the kext to drive the 2930CU and most other Adaptec cards from OS X 10.5. This is really strange as there were computers that shipped with the card and could officially support 10.5. I've tried, and had a friend who knows a lot more about this than me try, transplanting the kexts from 10.4 to make the card work(something that works for some other hardware) without any luck.

To put that aside, though, I've yet to get my hands on a card that will actually work in a G5. I've had some PowerDomain cards that looked promising, and one that I think probably DOES work aside from the fact that cables for the external connector seem non-existent.

If one wants both 10.5 and G5 compatibility, ATTO brand cards seem the only option, but they bring really strong prices on the secondary market even.

Also, we don't even want to discuss getting a compatible SCSI card for a PCIe G5 or a Mac Pro....

Wow again I say wow sounds like a p i t a for scanning negatives.

I don't want a Nikon Coolpix 9000 that no one can service or there's no parts I'm not ready to go down that road sounds like the Epson scanners although they keep changing the numbers on them they don't get any better.

I did speak with a guy today and a lab close to where I live I can't remember the name of the scanner that he has its back from like 2005 it's a dedicated film scanners not a flatbed it's not a drum scanner it's a Norawich or something like that.

He says he can give me very high res scans at a reasonable price he gave me the price list it was very very reasonable for the size of the files that he was going to give me in return I'm going to take a couple of my 120 negatives and give him a try just to see what it looks like I'm just curious I have to check it out compared to a lot of other places he's very reasonably priced is a 5.0 star rating from customers I spoke with him on the phone for 30 minutes soundssounds like it could be a good situation I got to give it a try I will not be purchasing a scanner after all of the negative s*** I've been reading.

Depending on the scan that this guy's going to give me I may just process my own negatives at home and send them over to this guy to scan he emails me the files and I go from there.

I will not be going down the buy my own scanner Rabbit Hole from all the stuff I've been reading here I'm not willing to invest the money in that.

I don't mind mailing or dropping off my negatives to a local lab if they can give me good high quality scans that could be an option.

I'm going to take some negative some black and white negatives over to this guy on Friday and but I'm do some scans email them back to me and then I'm going to kind of go from there.

But thank you guys I've read enough I will not be buying a scanner I will not be dropping a thousand or 1500 dollars on a scanner I'd rather pay a lab that is already set up with a dedicated scanner as long as it's reasonable I think this guy that I've been speaking to is going to charge me like five or six dollars negative that's fine I'm not going to send the whole roll to him whatever shot I take and I think it's halfway decent I'll have it scanned sounds like a decent option.

Hmm... I'll say it again...

"but digital is supposed

to be free..."

http://bayouline.com/o2.gif

Only in one's imagination... :rolleyes:

Among some of my other esoteric interests, I collect Apple Macintosh computers and a SCSI scanner isn't necessarily something that will send me running.

Agreed. When it comes to film scanners especially, I'm often amused by the terrified resistance potential owners have to the idea they'd need to allow a dreaded Mac under their roof, as if it would contaminate the house or something. More than a few newbie film photographers seem utterly unaware that all high-end scanners (and the first three generations of digital cameras/backs) were designed to interface with a Mac's built-in SCSI or FireWire, with Windows compatibility a far distant afterthought. There's some really useful older gear out there that requires a Mac to run it smoothly: just consider the Mac a part of the thing and relax. Some can also be run off an old WinXP tower, but if you're gonna be stuck with an extra dedicated CPU anyway you may as well use the Mac the device (and its software) was optimized for.

Speaking of which, thanks for the detailed update on the vagaries of Mac SCSI adapters with later versions of OSX: great info! I've never bothered to update a legacy Mac beyond OS 10.4, so never looked into this. Good to know. Tho sometimes I dearly miss the old days of OS 9.2.2: I cut my teeth in graphics firms starting with OS 7.1 on a Quadra 700 (beautiful CPU), finally supporting a team at a sportswear company running blue, gray and "mirrored door" Mac towers. I bailed during the hellish forced migration from OS 9.2.2 to OSX 10.3: not a fun time to be a designer (or their Mac tech manager).

More than a few newbie film photographers seem utterly unaware that all high-end scanners (and the first three generations of digital cameras/backs) were designed to interface with a Mac's built-in SCSI or FireWire,

I mentioned that I tested the Coolscan 8000 in the camera store last week before I put it on lay-a-way. I asked if I could bring a laptop in and test it in the store and they cautioned me a couple of times that it was Firewire. I said that I knew that and it wouldn't be a problem.

Before I went in, I took a rarely used white MacBook and loaded OS X 10.6(Snow Leopard) on it along with Nikon Scan 4. This is significant as at least versions 3 and 4(I don't know about earlier, and of course there's not a later version) of Nikon scan are "carbonized" meaning that they will run in both OS 9 and OS X. At the same time, though, they are old enough that they were never updated to run natively on Intel. OS X 10.6 is an Intel-only OS, but was the last version with Rosetta, the PPC emulator that was built into the first 3 Intel versions of OS X.

I picked the white MacBook I used specifically because it will run Snow Leopard and has a Firewire port on it. Of course, Firewire was present on all MacBook Pros through the 2011 models(plus the remaining 2012 non-retina models), but 2012s(my main computer) can not run Snow Leopard and I didn't really want to mess around with getting it installed on my 2011 MBP.

In any case, we set the scanner up on the counter, I just plugged it into the laptop I brought with me, and I was in business.

One other thing on Mac compatibility, though. I know that some drum scanners and possibly some high end film scanners require a HASP that plugs into the ADB port to run the software. The last Mac with an ADB port was the "blue and white" G3. The solder pads are there on the Yikes! G4 for the port, but I don't know if anyone has ever experimented with adding one(I keep meaning to). In any case, from experience with other software, a HASP will not work through an ADB-USB adapter like the Griffin iMate. Thus, practically speaking the B&W G3 is the best computer for the job. Even if you did have ADB on a Yikes! G4, the only practical difference between a PPC 750 and a PPC 7400/7410 is that the latter has the Altivec FPU. Clock for clock, software that is NOT coded to use Altivec(something certainly true of any software that requires an ADB HASP) will run at the same speed on a G4 as on a G3. If you can track down a late Sonnet 800mhz+ G4 upgrade, you might see SOME speed advantage due to the on-die L2 cache and off-die L3, but in my experience(again with other software) it's offset in a B&W G3 by the fact that you have to drop the front side bus to 66mhz for these to work. Side-by-side, G3-era versions of computation heavy software like Mathematic and Mac Spartan run faster on my B&W with a 1ghz G3 than they do on my beige G3 with a 1ghz G4.

That's probably more than anyone wants to know, though :) . As I said, this is another hobby of mine and these CPU upgrades I'm talking about are rare and expensive. As it so happened, two B&W G3s popped up on Ebay UK at the same time a few months ago-one with the 1ghz G3 card and the other with an even more rare VooDoo 5 graphics card. I bought both and had them shipped to a Mac collector/tinkerer friend in London. After he played with both for a few days, he pulled just the GPU and CPU and mailed them to me and kept the rest-he got two more B&Ws to play with, and I got the rare parts without it costing a fortune to ship the complete computers to the US.

An accidental 3 stops underexposed negative, transparent as clear glass, I could see right through it but the trusty LS 8000 with it's Xray vision dragged everything out into the open.

After some post processing, this is the final result. I was ready to throw the negative in the bin, glad I didn't now

I picked the white MacBook I used specifically because it will run Snow Leopard and has a Firewire port on it. Of course, Firewire was present on all MacBook Pros through the 2011 models(plus the remaining 2012 non-retina models), but 2012s(my main computer) can not run Snow Leopard and I didn't really want to mess around with getting it installed on my 2011 MBP.

I've always found it a tragic/comic irony that Steve Jobs killed the patient to save it. Despite Wall Street's endless hypocritical clutch-the-pearls handwringing all thru the 1990s, Apple was actually doing perfectly well as a niche supplier of midrange graphics/audio/video computers, with an ancillary share of the school/university/consumer market. It remained fairly steady despite an appalling run of terrible boards and worse CEOs: had Sculley been succeeded by anyone remotely competent, Apple would have been OK, and probably remained focused on providing the best solutions for graphics and A/V. When they lured Steve back instead, he had other plans: first to take his revenge by cratering everything that made the Mac special, then reorient the company as a purveyor of consumer electronics with a vague tie in to its Mac legacy. Slowly but surely, Apple began making one boneheaded, inexplicably hostile move after another that rapidly killed the Mac advantages in digital media integration until a significant percentage of the loyal user base switched to Windows because it was actually better at Apple's game than Apple had become. This continues today, with the utterly idiotic "USB-C ports and nothing else" on the latest MacBooks (apparently learning nothing from their overnight destruction of FireWire).

An accidental 3 stops underexposed negative, transparent as clear glass, I could see right through it but the trusty LS 8000 with it's Xray vision dragged everything out into the open.

 

After some post processing, this is the final result. I was ready to throw the negative in the bin, glad I didn't now

Very nice salvage job! I also have a CS8000, which I grabbed at a fire sale bargain price ten years ago because it arrived defective and the eBay seller refunded me half the purchase price so I could have Nikon repair it. Dealing with Nikon Melville scanner service was a nightmare I hope never to repeat, but after three round trips over six months they got it working perfectly. I dread the day it ever fails again, because now there's nobody left who knows how to fix them. To minimize wear and tear, I reserve it now for 120 film only, having bought a very nice Polaroid SprintScan 4000+ for my 35mm film. The Polaroid actually makes somewhat better 35mm scans anyway, much faster actually, and its software dust removal runs neck and neck with the CoolScan's ICE system.

Have a question for you guys the place I'm going to have scanned take my -2 and have it scanned the guy told me it's going to be like a 35 40 megabyte file.

How do I figure out what that translates into megapixels is it going to be like 3500x5000 what I'm trying to find out is what am I going to end up with a 20 megapixel file 15 what's the formula to figure that out?

Have a question for you guys the place I'm going to have scanned take my -2 and have it scanned the guy told me it's going to be like a 35 40 megabyte file.

How do I figure out what that translates into megapixels is it going to be like 3500x5000 what I'm trying to find out is what am I going to end up with a 20 megapixel file 15 what's the formula to figure that out?

Have a question for you guys the place I'm going to have scanned take my -2 and have it scanned the guy told me it's going to be like a 35 40 megabyte file.

 

How do I figure out what that translates into megapixels is it going to be like 3500x5000 what I'm trying to find out is what am I going to end up with a 20 megapixel file 15 what's the formula to figure that out?

Someone may contradict this, but I do not believe that there is really a way to make such a correlation without knowing a lot of factors about the capture device. The MP is going to be the resolution efficiency of the sensor, the same as any digital camera. What the actual storage file size is can be quite different from the pixel dimensions depending upon the output format and what degree of compression the format is using.