Good way of scanning negatives

[techmot]

Anyone know of a good, easy way of scanning old film negatives?. I have a very basic and cheap film negative that scans in 35mm fillm but it automically crops a certain portion of the negative and I am wanting to scan them as they are with no cropping, plus the scanner only scans 35mm and I have quite a few old b/w and colour film negatives that are in different formats, some are those large negatives that were common in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I know there is the Epson V600 series models but they are expensive. I've seen people attemping to photograph negatives using a phone where the light of the phone shines through, but it often produces very low quality and screen lines. Or there's a way of using a macro lens on an DSLR camera and using a lightbox.

[Subtitles]

Anyone know of a good, easy way of scanning old film negatives?. I have a very basic and cheap film negative that scans in 35mm fillm but it automically crops a certain portion of the negative and I am wanting to scan them as they are with no cropping, plus the scanner only scans 35mm and I have quite a few old b/w and colour film negatives that are in different formats, some are those large negatives that were common in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I know there is the Epson V600 series models but they are expensive. I've seen people attemping to photograph negatives using a phone where the light of the phone shines through, but it often produces very low quality and screen lines. Or there's a way of using a macro lens on an DSLR camera and using a lightbox.

I also need to do this but everything I saw was just a crap.
The only gadget that I believe worth buying is this Kodak one, but it is expensive $180 and they never dropped the price since I saw it.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084NVRHYQ/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_6?smid=A2LM6ZPY06LT1N&th=1

[lordsmurf]

That "Kodak" (not made by Kodak of yore) is junk, and is vastly expensive for what it is.

Plustek is really the only negative scanner now, but it's also junk compared to older discontinued Nikon.

For a quality scanner, the V600 is not expensive at all, at only $300. That was the price 10 years ago, pre-inflation. So it's actually gotten cheaper!

[hydra3333]

I looked at a few quick'n'nasty items online, and tried some inherited. All turned out to be junk.
I also tried the phone and camera thing they show in the internet, after buying super black cardboard and silver, etc ... all rubbish results even with a good 2yo camera/phone.

Since I had a few thousand slides of unlosable memories and no projector/screen any more (those are expensive) I had to bite the bullet and purchase an Epson Perfection V600 which came with the slide attachment.
It's been a couple of years part time, but when one sets up the defaults to one's liking and then scans at 4800 or 9600 the results are well, very well, worth it even though it takes a bit of disk space (which is comparatively cheap nowadays).

Perhaps you can live with "not so great, but close enough" results depending on how much the slides mean to the recipient.

The moral of the exercise, for me at least ? You get what you pay for.

[techmot]

So the Epson V600 in the best option I'm guessing. Yes photographing negatives using a phone is not a great idea as I've tried it myself, just produces poor results. There are many of those negative scanners but I think most aren't very good.

[lordsmurf]

Tip: Buy and use VueScan, not the Epson software for negative scanning. It makes a huge difference.

[zing269]

I used an Epson V500 a few years ago to scan negatives and it worked ok. The V600 has a higher dpi 6400x6400 vs 6400x9600 and a slightly larger negative holder. Like lordsmurf said, VueScan is much better than the Epson software. If you are only looking at 35mm then a used Nikon Coolscan or a Plustek will be better but much more expensive.

[hydra3333]

Tip: Buy and use VueScan, not the Epson software for negative scanning. It makes a huge difference.

That sounds like a plan.
I use epson's free software only because the Pro version of VueScan is the only version which does slide/negative scanning and it costs AU$179.95 which was a bit rich for me. As always, depends what the slide/negative memories are worth to you.

[techmot]

Late reply, but do you know if the V600 or any other negative scanner can also scan film negatives such as 110, 120, 126 (known as Instamatic film). I have quite a few 110 negatives and one or two 126 negatives; 126 negatives are all in b/w and date from the 50s and early 60s.

Also, I have some photos which when developed where developed at a large size compared the majority of the photos I have had developed over the years. When I found the negatives to the prints I noticed that they appeared to resemble 35mm film negative strips, yet each frame/exposure had a more squarer dimension than 35mm and they were less spaced apart from each other. The photos were taken in the late 90s (about 98/99) and were developed about the same time. These are the only negatives I have that are like this. The camera I used was a simple point and shoot film camera (Manimex) which always used 35mm film. It wasn't an APS camera or anything like that and it was the only film camera I was using at the time before I started using an Olympus AF camera a year later which took APS film. Anyone know what format this was?. It seems like it was some type of large format film that could be used on a regular 35mm AF camera.

[zing269]

The trick to scanning other size negatives is to have the film the correct distance above the glass as the scanner focus is slightly above the glass when scanning negatives. IIRC, my scanner came with a couple of different holders and I constructed some masks using cardboard to hold the different sized negatives. You might be able to buy holders for other sizes but they were kind of expensive when I was scanning, plus I had negatives from pretty much every size film since the Brownie...

[hydra3333]

Perhaps consider:

https://www.epson.com.au/products/scanner/perfectionv600photo_Specs.asp

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/what-it-s-like-to-scan-film-on-the-epson-v600#:~:text...x%209600%20dpi

https://www.flickr.com/groups/1269720@N20/discuss/72157628670430227/

[techmot]

Old reply here, but does anyone know why the Epson V600 is so expensive? (the V750 is even more expensive at around £800). Looking at prices on ebay, even for used scanners they are around the £200-300 price. Also I don't think they sell them new anymore, at least I couldn't find any on Amazon UK. Even the Plustek scanner which I have seen many video reviews about and is, supposedly quite good, is around £300, and the Plustek models only seem to be able to scan 35mm negatives. Considering most people have old negatives which are a mix of 35mm, 110mm, 120mm and those larger negative formats that were very common in the 1950s and 60s, I'm susprised these expensive scanners don't cater for those other negative formats as well.

I've seen videos using macro lens, a lightbox and other equipment to scan negatives.

I have a very cheap "Busbi" 35mm scanner. Even though it crops off the sides or top and bottom of each frame when you slide each negative into the scanner (which I don't like), it does do a fairly decent job at scanning, but it only scans 35 and 110 negatives. Considering it's such a cheap and basic scanner I'm surprised it actually scans more than one format, yet sometime like the Plustek only scans 35mm. I would still use my Busbi scanner for now only that for some reason it doesn't seem to work on my Windows 11 Lenovo laptop. When I load the Media Impression software and click on "aquire from negative scanner" there is nothing.

[Subtitles]

Please read Post #2
Even if it is junk, it might be better than any other similar gadgets. Also available on Amazon UK if this is more convenient for you. There is a 30 days window to return it if you are not satisfied. Just make sure you get money back and NOT credits. There is a larger screen version but more expensive.