Not a new Coolscan scanner but...

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So Nikon have announced a new scanning attachment http://www.thephoblographer.com/201...-adapter-will-make-film-scanning-much-easier/ The new D850 has built in software that will convert the negative files to positives but it will obviously work with other cameras too, $150ish

I'm not convinced it's particularly good value or that it's any better than the old slide copier type attachments Jessie's used to sell and it's not a new Coolscan scanner but it's yet another acknowledgment from a major player in the photographic world that the interest in film photography is continuing its resurgence.
 
Good news indeed, nice to see a major manufacturer acknowledging the fact that film still exists.

On a side note though, I wish that the chap who writes the Phoblographer would learn how to structure a sentence so it makes some kind of sense. :mad:
 
Might be a good idea to post this on the digi forum as well..it might tempt a few digi guys to use film now and again.
I don't think I could get my grandson off his i-phone to try film as he out smarts me every time..this time was at the RAF museum at Hendon where I took a two pano flash shot of a Lancaster bomber, he just got his i-phone out set it for pano and took the shot and it was quite good :eek:
 
Nice to see a major manufacturer acknowledging the fact that film still exists.

That's really the salient point. I personally won't be buying one, but what would be a nice, perhaps unforeseen, side effect is that it's actually quite good and forces the likes of Epson etc to stop p***ing around with the smallest of incremental changes.
 
A cool idea, and definitely a step in our favoured direction! :) It'd be great to have a new film scanning solution that wasn't either ridiculously expensive, or as Woodsy says, the same old Epson flatbed.
 
It's good to see but seems expensive for some injection-moulded plastic components. I'll hang on until the Chinese start producing their knock-off versions. Or @stevelmx5 puts together a better solution using a couple of old washing-up liquid bottles, some laser-cut sticky-back plastic and double-sided sticky tape (for speed).
 
It's good to see but seems expensive for some injection-moulded plastic components. I'll hang on until the Chinese start producing their knock-off versions. Or @stevelmx5 puts together a better solution using a couple of old washing-up liquid bottles, some laser-cut sticky-back plastic and double-sided sticky tape (for speed).

What about the magnets? Nothing is complete without magnets!

Joking aside, I'm not really sure that Nikon have done anything more than the slide copiers that have been available for the last 40 years? I haven't looked at them closely but I read the Facebook post about them by the Phoblographer and some of the comments were as if they were seeing a brand new invention!
 
Joking aside, I'm not really sure that Nikon have done anything more than the slide copiers that have been available for the last 40 years?

They've put their branding on it. That's the first $100, the rest is mark-up on the parts. The "commitment to the magic of analogue image capture" come free along with a stick-on ginger beard, lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans.


... some of the comments were as if they were seeing a brand new invention!

I don't wish to make you feel old but I suspect that many of those people are.
 
Longer than 40 years for both slide copiers and frames + bits to hold negatives/slides for copying with a macro lens.

From personal experience (in the last few days) I can state that the Epson V850 outperforms my slide copier + Sony a7rii combination hands down on resolution. What the result would be if I used a macro lens, slide copier attachment and bellows (which would cost less to buy than the Nikon kit) I can't say. After working through just short of 200 slides twice I lack the will to try again....

Edit to add:

See this link for a demo of the difference. Go into HPL to see the slide copier + camera version, and HPL2 for the V850 version of the same slides. Those suffering from extreme boredom could look at the images in the root of that link for more of my 30 year slide photos, all converted using the scanner.
 
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Many years ago I used to own the Minolta 5400 for 35mm and the Multi Scan Pro which I used for Medium Format, both scanners where know to be close to the best available at the price point they sold for.

Today I no longer have them and just use my digital camera with macro lens to copy negatives and convert on my PC, for MF I just use one of the net holders from my old Epson scanner placed onto a lightbox with the camera mounted on a tripod pointing down at the lightbox, for 35mm I use an old Onhar Zoom copier with all the optics removed and a 46mm adaptor fitted so it screws directly onto my macro lens.

How do the results compare, given that the scanners were 5400 & 4000dpi respectively and my camera is a 16mp m4/3 camera the results are very good, comparable to the 5400 for 35mm and actually better than the 4000 for MF.

Down side is there is obviously no IR cleaning and no automatic batch scanning

Plus side for the actual picture taking, the camera method is much quicker taking only a few seconds for each shot opposed to many minutes for either scanner

Obviously the camera cannot match the resolution of the MF scanner but the images are pin sharp and of a more manageable size from an archiving point of view.

More recently I tried one off the Optiscan 8200 scanners and that was just pants, super slow and just soft inn the focus department. Would be nice off the likes of Nikon updated the software to their old scanners so they worked with the newer O/S's though.
 
See this link for a demo of the difference. Go into HPL to see the slide copier + camera version, and HPL2 for the V850 version of the same slides. Those suffering from extreme boredom could look at the images in the root of that link for more of my 30 year slide photos, all converted using the scanner.
Irrespective of resolution, the exposure seems better with the camera / copier (see the white clouds), but there seems to be a focus issue?
 
They've put their branding on it. That's the first $100, the rest is mark-up on the parts. The "commitment to the magic of analogue image capture" come free along with a stick-on ginger beard, lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans.

I don't wish to make you feel old but I suspect that many of those people are.

I'm wearing a lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans as I type this :(;)
 
More recently I tried one off the Optiscan 8200 scanners and that was just pants, super slow and just soft inn the focus department. Would be nice off the likes of Nikon updated the software to their old scanners so they worked with the newer O/S's though.
Hasn't the main issue thus far been mask removal and inversion with colour neg film, using the copier method?

I've more or less given up on my Coolscan ls2000 because of its scsi connection requirement. But for 2700ppi it was a very good scanner for 35mm.

My later Coolscan V is not quite as fully-featured but has higher res, and with its usb connection I got it to run with Nikonscan 4 on Windows 10. It works well. Alternatively, a basic, dedicated version of Silverfast is available for about £35. I can't stand the Vuescan interface, and find its colour neg conversion inferior. Others' experience might be different.

The great hurdle though is scanning mf at a reasonable price.
 
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Irrespective of resolution, the exposure seems better with the camera / copier (see the white clouds), but there seems to be a focus issue?

Both sets are after I'd put them through Photoshop. As far as I can see, adjustment of the scanner version using Shadow/Highlight can replicate the camera version. Which do you think has the focus issue - the camera or scanner?
 
Which do you think has the focus issue - the camera or scanner?
Camera. Look to the left and right of the photo. Oddly, it looks like motion blur. The scanner version is sharper but the white is blown in the cloud.
 
Motion blur is a possibility - some of the photos have very definite camera shake. I was using the light from a large north facing window for the exposure, and some of them (the slide copier obviously has fixed aperture and a very small one at that) required exposures in the seconds. I reasoned that this wasn't a problem as the lens/subject positions were invariable under conditions of camera movement, and hence no problem. I hadn't considered this new fangled image stabilisation which (on the Sony a7rii) moves the sensor to compensate. The second round of using the copier (and redoing everything!) used it tripod mounted.

I agree that this one is odd in that only one side seems to be affected. The white isn't actually blown any more in the scanner one when I look in Photoshop - or at least, I think that they are the same. I can bring the scanner one back to the level of the copier. Some of the differences that are apparent between copier and scanner (when you have 150+ from each to compare) are down to the scanner adjustments I made on an individual basis.

For reasons outside my control, this whole project had to be started at the last minute. Basically, the project was mooted in Febuary to be fully discussed at the next monthly meeting. It only finally got onto the agenda in July, and the chairman was clearly surprised that you couldn't mount a photo exhibition starting with no prints and no frames at zero cost. I was asked for costings, which I provided subsequently by email with no reply. No budget was given as the chairman had no idea what the bank balance was. At the next meeting, the chairman couldn't recall any of the figures, but made a guess and set a £200 budget, which then became the official signal that we could procede. I had no intention of starting the work early, since so many projects are quietly dropped, and there was no reason to believe that this would be any different. :mad:
 
From personal experience (in the last few days) I can state that the Epson V850 outperforms my slide copier + Sony a7rii combination hands down on resolution. What the result would be if I used a macro lens, slide copier attachment and bellows (which would cost less to buy than the Nikon kit) I can't say. After working through just short of 200 slides twice I lack the will to try again....

From my experience, my A7 + FD 50mm f/3.5 + bellows rig beats my Epson V750 hands down for 35mm

I put up a thread about it a while back:

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/t...7-as-a-35mm-film-scanner.520691/#post-6023537
 
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