08.11
As you might have noticed recently, I have a newfound passion in analog photography. So I have my Holga camera, I have some film I shot with previously mentioned camera. But then… I can’t plug the roll of film into a USB port and download the images. So obviously I need to get the roll of film to be developed. Most labs offer services to only develop the film, or develop print and/or scan the images. Most scanning services start at 5 EUR per roll, usually offering 2 megapixel scans of your negatives. Some labs offers “professional” scanning services typically priced at 10 EUR per roll, most typically offering 6 megapixel scans of your negatives. But often this also means you’ll need to wait longer for your results. There are very very few labs who still actually have a 1 hour service.
So what are the alternatives. There are lots of film scanners available. Expensive professional ones from Canon and Nikon, or cheap scanners from several cheap brand companies. All these scanners share one trait in common, they all only offer drivers and complementary software for Windows and possibly Mac OS X. Which leaves users of alternative operating systems like Ubuntu up the creek without a map.
But recently a company called Ion Audio introduced a device they call Film2SD which they OEM from EU3C. It’s an inexpensive film scanner which does not need to be connected to a computer to be operated, it scans your images directly to an SD memory card. Which is just excellent, since you won’t need to bother with drivers and software anymore. This approach does have some inherent downsides. The device saves 8bit JPEG files, while computer driven scanners often produce 16bit TIFF files. The Film2SD scanner also automatically applies white balance correction, which you have no control over, but this generally works well. The unit does have a rotate option, so images can be previewed and saved as portrait.
The Film2SD unit can scan 6 135 film negatives via a tray, or 3 positives via another tray. It can’t take 120 film. Because of the tray approach it’s possible to scan a 36 exposure roll within 5 minutes or so, which is actually pretty quick.
Having said the above, the unit performs poorly out of the box. The unit is sold as 5 megapixel, which it really is. But somehow it seems the engineers have rigged the device to produce static size (~700KB) JPEGs. So if an image is complicated more JPEG artifacts are introduced (often lowering JPEG quality to as much as q70). Also the default firmware is very poor with black and white negatives, producing very high contrast images with lots of compression artifacts.
Confronting the kind support staff with the above problems, they coughed up a firmware update, which “solved” several issues. The new firmware cropped images to 4 megapixel, which got rid of black negative edges which occasionally turned up on the scans. It seems they also raised the static JPEG size to about ~900KB, combined with the lower pixel count means the JPEG quality seldomly falls below q90, which is fine. Somehow they also tweaked the black and white mode, to get proper contrast.
But even with the new firmware the unit still has it’s quirks. Sometimes when rotating the image, the preview image corrupts completely. Which isn’t a big deal, since you can cancel the operation and rescan the image. I’ve never had preview corruption twice in a row. Second the unit does attach EXIF information to the image, however it does include some odd information, which probably got left behind after development. For example the Make field seems to include some random characters. The comment field always says “My beautiful image”, which is a pain when uploading to Flickr, which automatically uses that to place a description below the image. And last but not least, somehow all images report “Copyright 2002″ even when the unit has only just hit the market. Quite ennoying.
Another problem is that my camera often exposes poorly since it does not meter the available light. Which means the scans are often a bit bland. To correct for this (which isn’t really a problem with the scanner), I use ImageMagick:
# convert -contrast-stretch 0%x0% -filter cubic -scale 80% [-colorspace gray] -quality 95 [-strip] in.jpg out.jpg
Now, the final verdict. I have mixed feelings about the Film2SD, really… It’s concept is brilliant, while the actual implementation is lacking in several area’s. But then again, it’s not very expensive either. And even though it has it’s fair share of faults, I wouldn’t want to miss it, it’s so very convenient to be able to scan your own film negatives.
