Scanner for "Contact Sheets"?

[donnydarko]

Do you think the owner of an Imacon 646 scanner can wish for more?

 

Well, yes...

 

My Imacon gives the maximum quality from any kind of film, but it is not fast.

 

So, I am looking for a scanner which I can use to scan 36 frames from a 35mm

film as a "contact sheet" very quickly, either as one scan or as 36 frames.

 

I do not expect a quality that allows me to print those scans for museum

exhibitions, just to save some work and view my negatives quickly. 95% of my

photos are b/w, so a scanner that is capable of showing the full range of

density will be important. Many film scanners don't get the highlights in

negatives when they are as dense as in a traditional b/w negative.

 

Any suggestions?

[amadou_diallo]

Creo/Kodak makes a line of flatbeds that can scan 36 frames in one go at quality that should

be somewhere between a desktop film scanner and the Imacon. http://graphics.kodak.com/

global/product/scanners/professional_scanners/default.htm But they're not cheap. If you can

settle for just contact sheet quality the Epson 1680 Pro is still in production and you can just

fit a 36 exp sleeve on its tranny bed. I use it to make digital contact sheets and it works very

well for that purpose.

[patricklavoie]

many Epson will do the job ask and way more, the Epson 4490 is 250$CAN.

[donnydarko]

Well, the Kodak gear is in fact close to Imacon's prices... whereas the Epson 4490 is cheap, but can only scan 12 images from a 35mm film at once... and if I read the technical sheet right it is so slow that I can hardly believe it...43 seconds for one frame, e.g. half an hour for one film, and changing the 12 frames every ten minutes. This scanner is a reason to buy a digital camera, in fact.

[beau 1664876222]

I knew somebody that set up a dslr with a macro lens over a light table. He'd photograph a whole sleeve of negatives and then reverse it to a positive in photoshop. The resulting contact sheet wasn't super high quality, but it did the job for him.

 

I've been thinking about doing an experiment with one of those portable, flat light-table things and a flatbed scanner; basically, sandwich the negative sleeve between the light-table and the scanner glass, and then run a scan in flatbed mode. Any thoughts on how that might work before I go buy the light-table thing?

[nickc1]

Beau - I tried the same thing to scan 4x5 negs on my Epson 3170. The Epson could be set for transparencies (it will scan up to 6x9), and with the lid removed I put the neg on the glass and a portable lightbox on top. Unfortunately the Epson 3170 software will only let the scanner scan 6cm wide - if you try to cheat and choose another model scanner with a wider scan the system just says 'cannot find scanner', so I have given up for the moment. BUT the bit of the 5x4 neg that fitted in the 6cm wide stripe was scanned to a high quality.

 

Nick

[beau 1664876222]

Aha... so if you set it to "transparency" it refuses to scan wider than the smaller overhead light source in the scanner's lid.

 

I wonder what would happen to that experiment if you told it to scan the whole 8x10 in flatbed mode? I suspect there would be way too much light because you'd have it coming from both above and below, but maybe you could ratchet down the brightness in the software to get it right. If only the light-table thing had a variable output- would think you could probably dial in just enough brightness to make it work as a flatbed scan.

[bobmichaels]

How about a system that resolves 100% of what is on the neg, is instantaneous, and cost less than $100?

 

I talking about a light box and a good loupe to look at the negs themselves.

 

The concept of scanning a sheet of negs and making a digital contact sheet is analgous to doing a high bandwidth video teleconference with the guy across the hall.

[donnydarko]

Bob,

 

well, you are somewhat right :-)

 

On the other hand, I do what you describe, today, and I would really like to see the images as positives. This afternoon, I will experiment with a lightbox on my office scanner and alternatively with a cheap Coolpix taking an image of negatives on the lightbox.

[._._z]

A lightbox and a loupe to use with negatives. Okay, what exactly do you think you'll be seeing when looking at the negs that will give you significantly useful information? With a scanned, reversed sheet of negatives, you at least will get a close approximation of the actual image.

[bobmichaels]

Z, you say "A lightbox and a loupe to use with negatives. Okay, what exactly do you think you'll be seeing when looking at the negs that will give you significantly useful information?"

 

Well, when I look at a neg on a lightbox with a loupe I see exactly what the image is, I can see the fine nuances that make the difference between a good photo and a great one, I can see the sharpness (far better than any two generation duplicate), in general I see all the data there is to see.

 

Yes, it is reversed positive to negative. But my brain quickly learned to compensate for that, so that's no issue at all.

 

I used to use contact sheets produced in the wet darkroom. But I don't bother now when I occasionally go back in the dark. I just go by the negs. It's looking at that original data that conveys the most information to me.