Project:Smartphone medium format film scanner

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:
- Film scanner lite (iOS)
- Helmut (Android)
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