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Automating scanning film with the help of Lego, a Raspberry Pi and a little machine learning

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There are a lot of options out there for scanning film these days, but there’s just something about building a device yourself. This one from Benjamin Bezine does so using Lego and a Raspberry Pi. What makes this solution a little special, though, is that it uses machine learning and vision AI in order to determine the edges of frames, so you don’t need to sit and operate it manually or worry about the number of turns changing as roll thickens and thins out or counting sprockets.

It’s called RoboScan, and Benjamin’s been working on it for a while now (it’s his “lockdown project”) but he’s not finished yet! It’s an open-source project and he’s been uploading the code to GitHub. Only 80 images were used to “train” the Raspberry Pi so that it knows what to look for, but it seems that it’s very effective with just that limited set.

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How to “scan” your film shots with the Nikon ES-2 digitizer and your camera

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The Nikon ES-2 Film Digitizing Adapter was announced way back in August 2017, along with the Nikon D850. It looks like somebody finally bought the $140 plastic tube, though, because a sort-of review and how-to has been posted to DPReview.

The D850 came with a feature specifically designed for use with the ES-2, and so does the new Nikon D780, which is what’s used in the video. Although you don’t have to use one of these two cameras. You can use it with any camera, as long as you have a macro lens.

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VueScan reverse engineered over 6,000 scanner drivers to bring compatibility to macOS Catalina

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macOS Catalina killed support for 32-Bit applications. This includes many (still) popular applications like Aperture and iPhoto, but also a lot of hardware for which no 64-Bit drivers exist. Including scanners. The two applications I mentioned have been saved, but now thanks to the folks at VueScan, so have thousands of scanners after they reverse-engineered the drivers.

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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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