What can I do with Disk Negatives???

[mike_tornero]

<p>Hello everyone, I have come accros some disk negatives about a hundred or so and I have no idea what to do with them. I went searching online and found a few places that still scans and prints them but they charge around $10-25 a disk and that could get expensive. So, is there a way that I can scan them myself? Or does anyone else have experience with this format?<br>

Any advice would be appreciated.<br>

Thank you very much.<br>

Mike</p>

[anov]

<p>You mean Kodak Disc Film?<br>

I guess it's expensive because it involves a lot of manual process, there's no scanner that has Kodak Disc adapter IMHO.<br>

A quick seach here yielded this:<br>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00BJhu">http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00BJhu</a><br>

Good luck.</p>

[patrick_mont]

<p>Dwayne's Photo still works with them (dwaynesphoto.com)</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>I suspect you could just drop the disk on any flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter, and get scans of them. But they may not be exactly in focus, and there's probably no flatbed scanner with enough resolution to make any sort of enlargment from the microscopic negatives. (They are only slightly larger than Minox negatives.)</p>

 

[walter_degroot]

<p>my wife found a strip of viewmaster format negatives,<br>

about the size of a 16mm frame each but in 2 rows on 35mm film.<br>

and since we tried scanning single negs in the slide part of our scanner.<br>

they came out as reversed bluish no color positives.<br>

partly a fault of the scanner "automatic" software,<br>

I tried Dale and Dwaynes, but they cannot do it.<br>

there used to be a 35mm film to make slides from negatives.<br>

with a zoom 35mm film slide duplicator it would be do-able<br>

does such a film still exist?</p>

[heinz_anderle]

VueScan and a high-resolution flatbed scanner may work best (Epson 4870, 4990, V700, and V750). The scanned image may need aggressive sharpening and slight downsizing. File size will not be a problem ;-)

[mike_tornero]

<p>Thanks everyone I really appreciate. I think ill try scanning them using a flatbed scanner and see how they turn out. <br>

Thanks again.<br>

Mike</p>

[User_502260]

<p>I would light the negatives from behind and copy them onto 35mm slide film. For this job I would use either my 12.5mm f/2 or 25mm f/2.5 Minolta micro lenses on a bellows. The flatter the negatives are sitting in the disk the easier the job will be. The problem is that even though micro lenses are optimized for use at or near wide open, depth of field at these magnifications is very shallow. The lens will need to be closed down several stops and these lenses do not have auto diaphragms. The Minolta X-700 has TTL flash metering so I would probably use a lamp to focus and then a 280PX with a diffuser to light the negatives. When you have the 35mm slide film developed, do not get it mounted. You will then be scanning the negatives in strips of the appropriate length for your scanner.<br>

Olympus made a 20mm micro lens which had both the OM mount built in and auto diaphragm operation. Olympus also made cameras with TTL flash metering and a nice bellows. I could also do this with a Canon 28mm or 24mm lens, reversed, on a Bellows FL. I would use the Canon Macro Auto Ring and a double cable release if that allowed me to get close enough to the negative without the Auto Ring touching the negative. This would give me semi-automatic diaphragm control and plenty of magnification. I don't have any Canon manual focus bodies with TTL flash metering so I would either calculate things manually using a test roll of b&w film or I would use a strong enough light behind the negative so I could focus properly. With either the Minolta or the Canon F-1 I would probably use a grid screen so the center would not black out and so I could line things up properly. Other possibilities would include using a reversed 40/3.5 Bogen Wide Angle enlarging lens on a bellows or a reversed 24mm lens with a bellows or extension tubes and an Auto Ring on a Konica camera which has a Nikon E focusing screen installed. <br>

Some scanners have adapters for APS film which can keep the film adequately flat but scanning of very small negatives and movie frames is still probaby too difficult if you want to salvage any kind of quality.</p>

 

[paul_miller10]

<p>My wife recently found a disk while going through her stuff. I copied the frames through my stereo microscope setup and converted them in Photoshop. If you have a macro lens you could probably do the same thing. The quality of disk negatives are pretty lousy, so if you can digitize rather than pay to get them printed you are better off.</p>

[mike_tornero]

<p>Jeff- Thats a great idea. I never thought to try that. The only thing is that I do not have a 35mm camera. I have a Mamiya RZ67 and the 140mm lens that has macro capabilities. Would that work? The film is larger, would that help with resolution?</p>

 

[greg_miller10]

<p>Generally the work we do is proprietary but I don't mind sharing this one because it's a headache to do and don't expect by sharing that anyone is going to go out and set themselves up a disc scanning business.<br>

We use an epson V750 with a custom laser cut metal carrier that holds several discs at once. The carrier is critical because it is necessary to hold the disc in precisely the same place on the flatbed with each new scan so that the action that we've created in photoshop to cut the the images out does not give us frame lines and the carrier needs to hold the negatives a precise distance off of the glass because focus is so critical with these little images. Also careful sharpening and degraining is critical to getting a good scan out of these little negatives.</p>

<p>I won't say it's a very lucrative business because it's not...that said though at the prices we charge it is worth while given the amount of work that's involved and how much messing around we needed to do get this up and going in a reliable and consistent manner.</p>

<p>All the best<br>

Greg Miller<br>

Film Rescue International</p>