Many years back I was happily scanning film using a Canon 4400F flatbed and, in all fairness, I thought it was pretty good and used it well past its sell by date. When Windows 10 decided it didn’t like the scanner any more and Canon had long since made it obsolete by not bothering to release updated drivers, I just cracked out an old PC that was more than happy to keep talking to it. That scanner is still in its box, in the garage “just in case.”
Then I inherited a huge amount of my grandfathers medium format negatives and suddenly I had no way of scanning them in. I spent a little while looking around for reasonably priced alternatives that had medium format capabilities and came across the Epson V600. This is one of the few mainstream, widely available flatbed film scanners still available today and completely compatible with modern versions of Windows. It comes with a range of negative holders that will allow you to scan in a whole range of film sizes and slides. I bought one even though I couldn’t really afford it at the time, seeing it as an investment not only in my own family history, but my future film scanning needs.
I wrote about this some time ago and was initially very impressed with the scan quality, especially with medium format scans I had nothing to complain about and it was a definite upgrade over the Canon 4400F, resolving far more detail than I’d ever seen before.
So… What went wrong?
- Ignorance is bliss
- How much better can it really get?
- Time to eat my own words?
- There’s another way?
- Patience and budget – both ran out
- Conclusions and learning
Ignorance is bliss
Not everything was plain sailing with the Epson V600. I’d got used to the fact that the Canon pulled out pretty good exposures straight out of the scanner. As previously mentioned, I wasn’t upset with the image quality out of it, but the scan speed was pedestrian to say the least. With a decent negative, the Canon could produce scans like this:
Now, I’m not suggesting that this is an incredible photo, but it is clear, sharp and has pretty decent detail. I really didn’t feel like I needed anything better than this, certainly not back in 2008 when I first bought the 4400F. I’ve never been obsessed with image quality to the point of worrying about pixel level detail. My requirements have usually been driven by budget – I’ll try to buy the best I can afford at the time, but within reason. Following this, sharpness and clarity are my primary concern and then I’ll consider how much detail, tonal range, dynamic range and so on the scanner or camera can produce. Ideally, I don’t want to spend time rescuing images, preferring to get them right in camera and then applying some basic corrections after. I’ve never been good at detailed Photoshopping of images and don’t really like the idea of a picture being far removed from what it was.
The Epson V600 really did feel like quite the upgrade. Certainly the medium format scanning ability was a deal maker, but the 35mm strip holders meant I could get through twelve frames at a time rather than the four at a time I could do with the Canon. That was a great step forwards on its own, let alone the apparent jump in detail when placed side by side with a scan from the 4400F. I thought I was on to a real winner.
You might notice, I’m not an expert. I’m not quite old enough to have grown up with darkroom equipment, my generation rode the peak of the film to digital transition. We all owned film cameras as children, but by the time we were teenagers (and teenagers with jobs and a disposable income) we were in the realm of the first affordable compact digitals. As such, I’ve been learning all the time and since I started this site and have gone through hundreds of rolls of film and nearly as many cameras, I’ve learned a lot about film. I’ve also concluded that it would be a lifetimes work to truly master all that film has to offer. This and my relative inexperience has meant some interesting mistakes and insights along the way.
Some months after purchasing the V600, I began to think that a few cameras I’d been using were metering shots incorrectly, blowing out the highlights on my negatives. With the benefit of hindsight, I now know that to truly blow a negative to the point where there’s absolutely nothing there that can be rescued would take some monumental over exposure to the point where it would be obvious that the camera was very broken. On a whim, I started to experiment with the scan settings and realised that the scanner default exposure settings were at fault.
The default scanning software almost consistently blows the highlights on every single frame. Adjusting the histogram levels manually goes a long way to solving this problem, but you shouldn’t have to do this. Anyone who knows scanners even remotely will currently be screaming “but, you fool, you can use the Silverfast software! You get better scans!” Well, yes, you do. You get slightly better scans, but only after earning a PHD in how the software works. Silverfast may well be great, but it has an interface that hasn’t been updated since 1997 and there is absolutely no way on this earth that software should be this awful in 2025. There are no excuses and frankly experiences like Silverfast provide just destroy any joy left in the whole process.
Regardless, I was still under the impression that the V600 was doing a reasonable job of providing decent scans at a decent resolution…
How much better can it really get?
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t totally naive. I knew full well that better quality scans were out there but the cost/benefit ratio didn’t make sense in my head. I also have a built in distrust of anything recommended or lauded by someone on Youtube. There are lots of “miracle” and “ultimate all in one simple scanning solutions” punted by people on their channels, and sadly by some people who I really used to enjoy watching. However, when they start extolling the virtues of something they were given to review it’s time to move on, especially after reading the real world experiences of people who have used these systems.
Whether I believed the reviews I’d seen or not, I’d begun to realise that the V600 really wasn’t all that after it kept giving me visibly soft scans regardless of the camera body and lens combination I was using. Every now and again I’d get a blindingly sharp and clear image like the one below which kept me guessing about whether it really was a camera or scanner fault.
I started to look in to possible dedicated film scanner replacements a few months back and there are several problems with buying a dedicated flatbed or even pure desktop film scanner. The first is that almost none are made any more, there are a couple of manufacturers but those that are rated the best of the best, such as Nikon’s CoolScan range, are no longer made.
The biggest issue, however, is cost. To buy an “average” scanner is going to cost £300 and that is for something that really won’t give a huge increase in image quality. If you want the best you are in the realm of thousands of pounds. I made the mistake of looking how much the best rated film scanner was, the Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED and it’s this much:
Yep. That’s two grand for a scanner released in 2004 and long since discontinued. As an aside, in about 2009 I had the opportunity to have one of these for next to nothing. Not having a clue about it and not really shooting much film back then, I turned it down. Just let that sink in for a moment or two.
So dedicated film scanners are way, way out of my league when it comes to budget. What’s the next option? SLR scanning of course.
Time to eat my own words?
Long time readers will know I’m not a huge fan of the SLR scanning bandwagon. Succinctly, this is because it’s often touted as the obvious solution but in reality it can cost you an absolute fortune in DSLR’s and lenses. I mentioned earlier the dreaded sponsored YouTube reviews and one hyped creation that did the rounds is the Valoi Easy 35. This is basically a lightbox and negative holder that screws directly in to your macro lens and away you go. It is elegant, looks the part and some videos I watched raved about how it had “transformed” their scanning process. Must be good, then?
Well… Not so fast. I very carefully considered it, despite the fact it costs £180, which is a fair whack for a light, some plastic clips and a tube. Bear in mind, I scan almost exclusively black and white so my scans are not really affected by the quality or temperature of light, so my requirements there aren’t too demanding. I just want something cheap and easy to use.
A few minutes on Google reveal that the Valoi is literally 3D printed and in no way perfect. For £180, supplying something 3D printed just doesn’t cut it, that’s far too “here’s one I made in my shed earlier” for my liking. 3D printed plastics have a habit of being variable in quality, have quality control issues and are often flimsy – and if you dig out some real user reviews for the poor people who’ve shelled out to find out for themselves they report that things are less than perfect.
Back to the drawing board. There are lots of novel solutions out there, including a brilliant 3D printed open source project which effectively makes a large cone that sits on a plate of glass. Its simple, elegant and works. Only… I don’t have a 3D printer and it would cost £2-300 for even a basic one. The project is here if you want to make your own.
Things were not looking great. I did some more digging and ended up on Ali-Express. You really can find anything on there, and I do mean anything. There’s a company called JJC that produce all kinds of niche camera equipment including their own take on the Valoi Easy 35. The catchily named “JJC ES-2 Film Digitizer” is exactly the same concept but costs half of a Valoi.
Is it 3D printed? Is it junk? It turns out the answer is no. The extension tubes are metal and the device itself is injection moulded plastic rather than a 3D printer special. This must be the way to go, then? I thought so. I thought so to the point I very nearly bought one until I read lots of people complaining that whilst the slide holder is brilliant, the 35mm film holder is useless because there are plastic dividers that require the film frames to be perfectly spaced and anyone who has ever used a 35mm camera knows this doesn’t happen and varies between camera models.
The JJC is available on Amazon, if you don’t trust Ali-Express, and remarkably for the same cost too. It really is a viable option if you’re prepared to modify the film holders to remove the separators, but that’s not for me. Don’t let the four star review rating fool you either, a lot of them have a serious bot/AI/I was paid to write this fake review feel.
These all in one solutions have a lot going for them – they hold the film perfectly flat, come with extension tubes so you can get the whole frame at 1:1 on your macro lens of choice, provide an even light source, block out external light and negate the need for a tripod. That’s a lot of pro’s and I really do like these systems in principle – if someone could combine the Valoi idea and negative holder with some injection moulds….
Where does this leave me? With two choices – bite the bullet and just buy the Valoi, or go for the “component” setup.
There’s another way?
The final option is to buy or find an even light source, a negative holder, a tripod and a camera with a macro lens. This is some photographers preferred method, I think probably because it gives total control and you can switch between different formats by just changing the negative holder. It is also the most fiddly and time consuming method of scanning your film – you win some, you lose some.
This is where we come full circle. For any of these options we have avoided the elephant in the room – cost. I know I’ve mentioned the cost of the scanning accessories, but this all assumes that you own a DSLR and a macro lens. These things are not cheap and explains why I spent so long weighing up the cost of a dedicated scanner against the cost of going down the DSLR scanning route.
My interest, you may have noticed, is in the old rather than the new and especially so when it comes to digital photography. I own two DSLR’s – a Canon 5D Mark 1 and a very, very battered Canon 40D that cost me literally £5. I do have plans in the future to buy one single DSLR that will be slightly newer and will fill all of my needs in one single body, but that’s not going to happen just yet. A second hand 5D is roughly £150-200 and a 40D is still around £50-80 depending on condition. Obviously, better cameras cost more.
The next hurdle is acquiring a macro lens. I could’ve gone down the super cheap route and used existing lenses with extension tubes. I decided against this for a few reasons, but the main one being that if I used a solution like the Valoi or JJC then I’d end up with about 3ft of pipes, lenses and attachments hanging off my camera. I even looked in to using an old FD macro lens and converting it, but again, in the interest of all out resolution this probably isn’t the best idea. The more converters or layers of glass you introduce the more you subtly degrade the final image.
Theres a consensus that you need a 1:1 macro, something in the 100mm range is most common. The Canon 100mm macro is roughly £150 second hand, other macro options from Sigma and Tamron are similarly priced or even more expensive. I then discovered the Sigma 50mm F2.8 EX Macro. Reviews showed that this is an old, but really very sharp and highly rated lens which can produce the magic 1:1 image size. Better still, there were several on eBay for between £55 and 65 – this was even cheaper than buying an FD macro and converting it. This felt like the most sensible place to start and was within budget.
The lens arrived in perfect condition and has already revealed a world of potential for future projects – Macro is something I’ve only ever really experimented with once before.
Patience and budget – both ran out
The lens sat around for a week or so doing nothing, after all, I didn’t have anything to attach it to. It was then that I decided to just see what I could bodge together to have a practise with and by bodge, I really do mean bodge.
I have an old tripod gathering dust in the garage, all I needed then was a light source and something to hold the negative. Considering the Epson V600 comes with a selection of negative holders, why not just use those? As for a light source, I’d seen all kinds of recommendations including some I’d tried before such as just using a ceiling panel light. In the end I raised the brightness on an iPad and turned that into a makeshift lightbox. That left me with this epic scanning solution:
Let’s not beat around the bush, this is as low quality as you can get. There is nothing precise or accurate about this and as such the results should be average at best.
I read lots of hilarious things that other people said about DSLR scanning. “Just use the focus peeking or zoom function of your camera’s live view”
The 5D doesn’t even have live view.
“Focus is critical, manual focus and use focus peeking!”
I just used AF, looked through the viewfinder and thought “yeah, that looks ok”
“You must use the correct temperature of light source.”
Er….
“Wear gloves, clean the negatives, don’t breathe near the negatives”
I gave the negatives a cursory blow with the rocket blower.
Going on this, the result’s should’ve been crap, shouldn’t they?
Conclusions and learning
No. No, if anything the results were nothing short of astounding.
Firstly, there is a lot more to learn here and I will invest in a better light source and a dedicated negative holder. I also need to nail down the correct exposure settings. I settled for the following method: F8, ISO 100, fill the frame with the negative, focus, self timer on, take the picture. From some experimentation, over exposing by around a stop from the metered exposure gave the best results but this varied. As I said, there is much more to learn and experiment with.
What about those results, though? Take a look for yourself. This is a direct, side by side comparison – Epson V600 on the left, Canon 5D on the right:
Now, initially you might look and think “So? Looks ok doesn’t it?” and you might have a point. The V600 is absolutely capable of “ok.”
But, look more closely. The first thing that strikes me is that the V600 scan has much less tonal range on the face and whilst this can be a consequence of post processing, I tried to keep that to an absolute minimum. The main reason for the difference is that the Canon 5D picked up far more dynamic range than the Epson did, giving much more graduation between light and dark areas. If you smash the highlight slider you can achieve a similar effect on the 5D image and I’ll accept that there are minor differences in how the image is processed. Ideally I’d like the highlights on her face a little lighter but, you get the general idea.
Now look at the hair, there is so much more definition, clarity and sharpness to the hair in the 5D image. It’s bonkers how much more detail there was in this negative, indeed before now I’d never quite considered just how much detail film was capable of picking up. Look also at her fingers and nails on the microphone, there’s quite the difference in sharpness and detail.
Finally, the most devastating indictment of the V600, I’ll let you in to a secret about that image. The V600 image on the left has been sharpened by 90% with a 1.4 pixel radius unsharp mask in Photoshop. If you don’t know what that means, it means the image has been sharpened an awful lot and it is still pretty soft overall. Without it, the image would appear even more blurry than it currently is. The image on the right, the Canon 5D image… is unaltered. Zero sharpening. None.
Stop and consider all this for a minute. This is my first ever attempt at this method of scanning. I have snapped a photo of a negative sat loosely on an iPad, converted it in Camera Raw by inverting the levels curve, applied a dash of contrast and… that’s it. With this complete and utter Heath Robinson special I have achieved sharpness, definition and tonal range that I didn’t even know existed in this negative. I can’t get over it. Worse, it makes an absolute mockery of the images produced by the V600 which I paid a small fortune for – and more combined than I paid for the Sigma lens and Canon 5D.
So where does this leave things? I think it’s time to be objective. On one hand, the V600 is simple. It makes scans that are almost completely variable – at times good, other times they have poor exposure and occasionally it completely misses the point and gives you soft pictures.
The thing is, when I scan a roll of film and get dodgy results or unexpectedly soft images it really does sap the joy out of the process. I’ve often looked at film pictures from other photographers and wondered how they managed to get such crystal clear images. “Ah, but they’ll have that top of the range scanner!” Perhaps not, I’ve just achieved sharp, detailed images with the equivalent of a roll of sellotape and a few toilet roll tubes. I’m left wondering how many frames I’ve discounted because they were soft when in fact, they may well not be.
The V600 is even more disappointing because I blew a budget that I didn’t have on it, believing I’d get quality images in return. According to the detailed tests at filmscanner.info the scanner doesn’t even resolve 50% of its claimed maximum 6400dpi resolution.
However, I wish I could now turn round and say “but here’s the perfect solution” but I can’t. If I’ve learned anything it is that film scanning is an absolute nightmare of variables, inconsistency and complexity. There is no true perfect solution right now. Those that come close to offering real simplicity and ease, such as the Valoi, suffer from a shameful lack of quality control that shouldn’t exist in a £180 product. At half the price, perhaps it would be forgivable. If they upgraded the build quality and stopped 3D printing, then yes it would be a really tempting all in one solution.
I understand that many of my problems are of my own creation – some through ignorance, some inexperience and others through a total lack of budget. The budget part I can’t get over. Film photography is not and should not be the realm of those with the deepest pockets. It is not some kind of luxury, exclusive club that only the lucky few can be a member of. As such I’m instantly turned off by (and priced out of) the more luxury options of premium lighting, perfect negative holders, the highest quality optics and 50mp DSLR’s with which to capture the final image. You can very easily spend near enough £1000 on the best equipment for film scanning and at that point you might as well buy a Hasselblad dedicated film scanner but… What’s the point really? It’s insanity itself unless for some reason your career depends on those images or you’re producing a book.
I think the most sensible way forwards is to invest in a new backlight first and then spend some time learning and refining with what I have. There’s a lot of room for improvement, especially in getting the initial exposure right to get maximum dynamic range out of the negative and learning far more about the best way to convert the negative. I’ll definitely buy a better light source simply for convenience, the iPad was proof of concept but too small and does run the risk of showing pixels through the back of an image. I might also look for a better negative holder because flatter negatives are apparently happier negatives.
Overall, though, I think we can all tell that the days of flatbed scanning are well and truly over.
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