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Kodak’s $40 Mobile Film Scanner is the Google Cardboard of scanners

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In this age of the fight against plastic, cardboard has become a common construction material again. Coffee places the world over have switched out to cardboard straws, Google Cardboard remains one of the most popular VR “headsets” for your phone, and now Kodak is using cardboard to make their new Mobile Film Scanner.

“Scanning” film with a phone or digital camera is not a new idea, but it typically comes at a heavy expense. But for those who want to scan with their phone, they usually don’t want to spend a lot of money. Kodak’s new Mobile Film Scanner only costs $40.

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The Film Carrier Mk1 is yet another film holder for “scanning” your film with a digital camera

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There’s a new Kickstarter up from a company going by the name of Negative Supply. It’s for the “Film Carrier Mk1”, a 35mm roll film holder for “scanning” with your DSLR or mirrorless camera. Not exactly a new idea, although they think they’ve come up with a new way of doing it.

For those developing their own film, it could be a handy way to get your shots into the computer quickly with the least amount of fuss. They claim it can let you do it in 5 minutes or less. It’s not cheap, though.

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These ethereal portraits were created using a flatbed scanner

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I believe that quite a few of us have played with flatbed scanners and “took photos” with it. But Maitha Demithan took this to a whole new level. The Dubai-based artist creates dreamy portraits with a large format scanner. In her work, she has scanned people as well as animals to create beautiful, ethereal images.

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How to quickly and easily “scan” negative film with your digital camera and a copy stand

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Scanning film is one of the biggest issues with shooting film today. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult, it’s just a pain because most of us tend to do it so little. Maybe a roll or two every few weeks. Pulling out the scanner and hooking it up can be a chore, so we put it off and just never get around to it. I’ve got plenty of rolls here that have been developed but not scanned yet.

Photographer, Matt Day, however, has a simple solution to this problem. A solution that’s compact, quicker to set up than a scanner on your computer, as well as being faster and easier to actually “scan” in your images. Using a simple copy stand and an LED panel, he can get through a lot of film through very quickly and easily.

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How I “scanned” old negatives with $0 budget, a DSLR and stuff I had at home

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A few days ago, my boyfriend found some old 35mm negatives. I really wanted to see baby photos of him, so I was wondering: can I “scan” these films with just my DSLR and the stuff I had lying around? I’ve never done it before, neither with a proper scanner nor by improvising. So, I gave it a shot and after some DIY solutions, improvisation and lots of fun – I did it. I’ll share my process with you in this article. So, if you have some old negatives and some free time, take a look.

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Do you have any old slides that you want to scan? Here is my cheap and easy way to do it at home

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A couple months ago, we had a family friend who got a hold of some really old family photos. She came over and asked me if there was any way that I could convert her old slides to digital images. Since I do not own a slide scanner, I was about to tell her that there was nothing I could do, that was until I came up with a plan B.

I was holding one of her slides up to a light to see the image, when I came up with an idea.

I knew that I needed to backlight the slide to see the image, and I also knew that if I could get in close enough, I could capture a digital image of the slide. In order to get a good solid backlight, Here is what I came up with

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Nikon D850 doubles as 35mm film scanner with ES-2 adapter

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Nikon D850 was officially announced yesterday, and we went through all of its features. The camera undoubtedly thrilled many digital photographers, but there’s another useful feature occasional film photographers will find useful.

With the optional ES-2 film digitizing adapter, Nikon D850 doubles as a 45.7 MP film scanner. You can use it for both 35mm negatives and slides, and take advantage of the high pixel count on the latest Nikon’s DSLR.

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Google’s PhotoScan app now automatically removes glare from old photos

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Printing the photos gains popularity even in the digital age, and it undoubtedly has many advantages. Still, if you want to reverse the process and turn an old print into digital format, Google’s PhotoScan now makes it easier than ever.

The app now makes it possible to make the photos glare-free without taking multiple images. You can take a snap of a print, and the app will remove the glare from the single photo, in one tap.

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These are my five best film scanners under $200

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Scanning film is probably the least attractive part of shooting film but that doesn’t mean you should neglect this stage. Nowadays, we all want to share our analog images online and the only way to do that is by digitalising our negatives one way or another. If you want to get the most out of your negative, then you should choose your scanner carefully as it’s probably THE most important part of the chain after capturing the image.

Scanners can be as cheap as a dinner for 2 or as expensive as a car but today we’ll be looking at what is considered the mid-range film scanners. We want to avoid the low-range (under 100$) as they deliver poor quality scans which will have to be rescanned at some point. We will also avoid the high-range simply because we can’t afford it (yet!). The mid-range is ideal for sharing your images online, medium sized prints and archiving.

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How to get lab quality film scans at home using wet mounts

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One of the trickier aspects of shooting film is being able to share your work. If you have a lab develop your film, you can often have them scan it. But general lab scanning quality seems to have gone downhill over the last few years. Unless you’re willing to pay a fortune for it. If you develop yourself, then sending it off to scan can become even more expensive.

Drum scanners are still going to generally give the best quality, but they’re a bit out of the budget of most photographers. This is why good labs charge so much, to cover those costs. At home, the best we can usually do is a high end flatbed. Like the Epson Perfection V850. But even the quality of those can be drastically improved. In this video, Analog Process walks us through wet mount scanning our film for maximum quality.

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