Saturday 17 January 2015

How I Learned to Hate Scanning Less

One of the unsung heroes in my photographic arsenal is my Epson Perfection V500 scanner. While not as hyped in the flatbed film scanning world as it's large format capable siblings in the V700/800 series, for medium format on down it's nearly as capable at a fraction of the cost. The slightly over $100 (Cdn) clearance price I picked it up for is quite possibly the best money I have ever spend on photographic equipment of any kind.

My praise of just about everything about this scanner ends however at the included negative carriers. They're flimsy yes, though considering they're meant to hold precious one of a kind original images one would hope they wouldn't need to endure anything approaching man-handling. (Speaking as a man I'm not sure if I resent that term.) More to the point however it is notoriously difficult to get negatives into them, a difficulty that seems to grow exponentially with the degree of film curl present in those negatives. Two strips of 35mm film can be placed in the 35mm holder so they are held relatively securely at one end, leaving the remainder of the strips entirely loose so they must be manipulated to stay aligned in their frames as the top part of the frame holder, an entirely separate piece, is clipped into place over them. The 120 holder has next to nothing to keep the negative strip in place until the the hinged top of the frame is closed, an operation which itself tends to push them out of place and efforts to hold it in place may result in the film buckling. Further, once closed I would often find the negative had shifted enough to require a small reposition leaving me to decide whether it was better to start the whole operation over again or trying to adjust it with the carrier clamped closed which always had me worried about scratching or otherwise damaging the negative (though I don't know that any actual harm ever resulted from this).

The stock 120 carrier for the Epson Perfection V500 (above)
along with the Lomography 120 DigtaLIZA (below.)

Enter the Lomography DigitaLIZA, an alternative negative/transparency carrier with a unique positioning and loading system that among other things is supposed to avoid most of the problems common to other carriers such as the ones I have experienced. It is also, apparently, exact enough to allow 35mm negatives to be held by the very edge of the film, allowing the sprocket hole area of the film to be part of the scan. The trick involves a metal plate that sits in the bottom of the frame bringing everything flush to the ledge the film sits on. After positioning the film an upper magnetic plate is positioned on top, clamping to the metal plate underneath, sandwiching the film flat and exactly in place. The hinged frame can now be closed without fear the film will shift in the process, at which time the upper plate can be pulled free, releasing the lower plate while the film remains perfectly in place.

If it's a bit convoluted to describe in words Lomography hosts a video showing the process which you can see here.

This much you could have learned from the Lomography site, so how does all of this translate into practice? After fighting with the Epson carriers one too many times I decided it was worth a go. Much of the fanfare surrounding the DigitaLIZA focuses on the 35mm version's ability to make include nearly the full width of the film during scanning including the sprocket holes.  Photographers who use adapters to shoot 35mm film in medium format cameras or other tricks to get an image across the whole width of the film have few other practical choices for getting this additional image width scanned. While I experiment with techniques like this myself, 120 film is by far the majority of what I shoot these days, and its the format I struggle with the most using the stock carriers, so it was the medium format version that I ordered. At the time of this writing the 120 DigitaLIZA goes for $45 (US) in the Lomography store, but with a bit of shopping around may be found for less through some resellers.

It arrived in attractively designed custom box that makes it tempting to carefully repackage the unit after every use rather than toss it in a drawer. If the box board thin Epson carrier struck me as a little flimsy before it seems even more so compared the the DigitaLIZA, especially when the metal bottom plate is attached. Despite the more rugged build the film is still sits in the holder at about the same distance from the scanner glass as is the case with the stock Epson carrier.

The DigitaLIZA's frame window is wide enough to accommodate three 6x6 negatives at once. If you shoot square format and cut film into strips of four you'll have to reposition the film once to scan the whole strip. Since I primarily shoot 6x7 negatives the window will allow only two negatives to be scanned, so a repositioning will again be required to scan a strip of three. By itself this is an improvement over the Epson carrier, which permits only two 6x6 negatives to be scanned at a time, only one at a time for larger 120 formats, and if you shoot panoramic formats larger than 6x12 you could be in trouble.

The bigger point however isn't how often negatives have to be repositioned, it's how easy they are to position in the first place. If all my negatives layed dead flat I probably wouldn't have too much to complain about with the Epson carrier but even a bit of curl is enough to make positioning the frame properly without risking damage or getting fingerprints all over the image into a struggle. To look at Lomography's video demo it would seem like loading the DigiaLIZA couldn't be simpler, but does the seemingly foolproof mechanism go this smoothly in actual use?

Well, for the most part yes, yes it does. When the negative strip is first placed in the carrier it sits in a recess deep enough to keep the edges of the film from going anywhere. This is in contrast the stock carrier's ledge which is much too shallow to keep the film from sliding around or buckling, something that tends to happen as the hinged frame is closed, The DigitaLIZA further largely avoids problems keeping the film held in place while the top part of the holder is closed down with the magnetic top plate that is put in place once the negative strip is aligned, holding it there until the hinged lid is closed at which plate it can be removed without risk of the film slipping out of place. I say largely avoids because with more severely curled film I find getting the top plate in place without the film moving can be a small challenge, though nothing compared to the struggle that would be needed to get the same images ready to scan with the stock carrier. This small difficulty aside the DigitaLIZA's loading mechanism aside it has worked for me as advertised.

Once loaded however the DigitaLIZA does have a downside compared to Epson's carriers for the V500 however - there is no provision to get it positioned correctly on the scanning bed. This might not be a concern at all with large format units that can scan the entire area of the scanning bed, but the V500 and similar flatbeds designed for smaller formats require the film to be lined up under the transparency scanning strip in the lid. The stock carriers are designed to align with this automatically. As a universal carrier, the DigitaLIZA has no such provision. Lining things up by eye would probably be good enough to get the entire negative into the scanning zone, but it almost certainly wouldn't be square to the edge. In cases like this it\s necessary to come up with some sort of alignment device. A simple cardboard strip of appropriate width would do the trick, though I found I could use the lower plate from the DigitaLIZA's magnetic positioning system does the job admirably and I suspect this would be the case for most scanners.

A comparison of scans from the Epson Perfection V500 using the stock 120
 negative carrier and the 120 version of the Lomography DigitaLIZA.

The only question that remained is whether there was any impact on the scan quality. Might the magnetic sandwich positioning system hold the film flatter leading to sharper scans? Might the film to scan bed distance differ from what is spec for my scanner making scans a little less sharp. I put this one to the test scanning by scanning the same image using both carriers and to my eye the results are functionally identical. If you'd rather judge for yourself I include the comparison images above for your own consideration. The insets show crops at full resolution from identical areas of each scan made at 3200 dpi. (Click to bring the image up at full resolution.)

The bottom line is that, at the cost of auto alignment provisions you may get with a flatbed film scanner's stock carriers, the DigitaLIZA addresses the shortcomings these carriers are often plagued with in regards to positioning and loading of negatives and transparencies. Not only is this task made easier While the 35mm's big selling feature, the ability scan the width of the film out to and including the sprocket holes, does not apply to the 120 version, this benefit alone may make the DigitaLIZA well worth the price in terms of saved time and diminished risk of damaging irreplaceable images as a result of buckling, scratching or throwing the whole mess at a wall in frustration.

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