Like many people that happened to hold a camera in their hands in the time of “analog” photography, I ended up with a couple of shoe boxes full of film rolls and some envelopes with cut film. Some of the images were printed but quite significant amount never were. And I thought: “What should i do to make it all digital?”. I tried small cheap film scanners with no success. Then I tried a dedicated flatbed scanner which, according to reviews, should have produced good results. The quality of the scans was indeed pretty good but there were quite some drawbacks: I got overexposed scans and I couldn’t influence it, i couldn’t shoot in RAW and it was tremendously slow. It took about five minutes to get one good scan.
I was almost ready to send my films to some specialized service which would cost me a lot but then I thought: “Hang on! I have a good digital camera. Why don’t I use it to scan my films?”
It was not a completely novel idea but none of the devices I found on the internet seemed good enough to make me buy it.
After some research, tests and brainstorms with friends I came up with a device that converts a camera into a film scanner.
These are the key features that this device has:
– It is very fast
– It keeps the film firmly in focus
– It provides great quality scans (as good as your camera)
– It features a high quality LED light source with a great CRI
– The film is firmly clamped which help to keep the negative in focus
– You have full control over exposure and color (shooting in RAW)
– It is compact and you can disassemble to make it even more compact for storage
– There is no need to send your precious negatives anywhere
– No messing with frames
– No need to cut film rolls
About Speed And Quality
No doubt that a professional film scanner would do a great job both quality- and speed-wise. However prices of such devices start at about 500 euro and sky is the limit. Sending you negatives to be scanned is an option too but, if you have many of them, you are going to spend hundreds of euros for this service.
Simple and cheap (from 40 to 100 euro) table-top scanners are pretty fast if you don’t count the time you need to squeeze you film into a plastic frame. But the quality of scans is unsurprisingly crappy.
Dedicated flatbed scanners (those with a special adapters to scan films) are not so bad quality-wise since the resolution is usually decent. But the speed is nothing but disappointment – five minutes to scan a single negative. And you have the trouble of plastic frame here as well.
With CamScan your scan is as good as your camera-lens combination. You shoot fast because it’s nothing more than just pressing a button.
