Project:Smartphone medium format film scanner
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Why?
Dedicated medium format scanners are generally expensive! Some flatbed scanners (e.g. Epson V550/V600) can scan medium but they're also expensive and quite slow/fiddly.
Inspiration
What can you do with it?
Quickly (few secs/frame) scan 120 film with a smartphone. Currently optimised for:
- scanning 6x6 only (including a bit of the frame edge) but could be adapted to other formats
- using with iPhone (other phones may work as well but may need height adjustment to fill the frame)
What does it look like?
What do you need?
- Lasercut frame from wood/acrylic
- Lasercut light diffuser
- Set of 3mm diameter screws/nuts for mounting diffuser to the frame
- LED video light for backlighting the film through the diffuser - something cheap like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nanguang-CN-126-OrientEX-Camcorder-Panasonic/dp/B006OI3Z2M/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1465934504&sr=8-4&keywords=led+video+light (~£20)
- Smartphone with high resolution camera (optimised for iPhone 6/6s/plus but should work with other phones)
- Alternatively, you can take off the top panel and point a DSLR camera directly at the backlit film for very high resolution photos
- If you want to get negatives inverted directly on the phone, you need an app dedicated to scanning film such as:
- Otherwise you can use take a photo using the normal camera app (or an app like Camera+ that can save TIFF files without JPEG compression), and invert photos later in Photoshop/Lightroom
Lasercut files to be uploaded.
Quality
With an iPhone 6, you can get a 4MP picture (~2000x2000px) with a decent-enough resolution for sharing online. With a Canon 70D DSLR, you can get a 10MP picture (~3200x3200px).
JPEG saved from Film Scanner Lite on iPhone 6, cropped, no further editing
Shot in RAW with DSLR, cropped and edited in Lightroom
