"Easy and cheap" would appear to be the hangups here. The problem with nearly all film-scanning flatbeds is that the backlight for the transparency adapter is less than 8x10, so it is impossible to scan an entire sheet of negatives or slides in one pass. I think either Epson or Canon had one for a brief time but neither company has such a product listed on its website at the moment. I could also be imagining things again. Removing strips of negatives or (worse) individual slides from their Print-View sheets and mounting four to six at a time in scanner adapters is a Sisyphean task when faced with large numbers of images to scan.
I would venture that the biggest problem you face is that the internal front-light in the scanner is still shining on your negatives, when what you want is to disable this light and rely entirely on the backlight for illumination. This is why the contrast is so low. Manufacturers' transparency adapters do this automatically. If you are good with electronics I suppose it would not be too big a challenge to disable the front-light yourself - probably just a matter of knowing which cable to clip.
On the other hand, you could try the digital camera route. I have done this with B+W negatives and with color slides and the results were acceptable - certainly good enough for contact sheet purposes. Simply place the negatives on the light box (a clear window would probably work just as well), set your camera to macro mode and turn off the flash, and snap each frame in sequence. This method is very fast to capture the images, but you will have to process the digital images for color correction and correct cropping later. If you have Photoshop you could probably automate this process if you are not too picky about the results. If photographing negatives, you will need to use the Levels and/or Curves control to set the black and white points, as the contrast will be quite small. I have not photographed an entire sheet of transparencies in one frame, but rather photographed each slide or negative on its own. Then again, I am using a 5-year old low-resolution digital P&S camera. A newer, higher-resolution camera might produce acceptable results photographing the entire sheet, but it only takes one second or so to frame, focus, and shoot each negative, so why bother?
Best regards, Aaron On Jun 17, 2008, at 1:25 PM, John Wild wrote:
Having a Minolta Scan Multi MF film scanner, I get the all the quality for an individual image I need but I just want to be able to 'contact' sheets of negs quickly and cheaply for reference, so I can select theimages I want without having to squint through a magnifier over a lightbox and try to mentally invert the negative. It's something I've been thinking about for ages but only periodically get the time to experiment. Technology changes so rapidly that I am surprised nothing has been developed with this idea in mind. I haven't given up on the flatbed idea yet, I need to try other combinations. I might try a digital photograph of a sheet of negatives on a lightbox. Apparently this works for single 35mm transparencies. Ican get quite resourceful if I think there is an easy (and cheap) way to do something with equipment to hand. However, I usually spend more timeand money trying to find a way rather than getting the proper piece of equipment in the first place. You may very well be able to say 'I told you so' when I buy a V500 scanner in 6 months time........ ;-)
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