Film Scanners

A film scanner is an electronic device that lets you scan film and put it on your computer. You can scan 35mm negatives, along with other negatives and types of film. Yup, simply put, it’s a scanner for film and transparencies.  A regular scanner can not do this type of work, it has to be a film scanner.  If you have some film you need to scan, then a film scanner is what you need.

Here are some situations that would require the use of a film scanner. One reason for the need of a film scanner is to scan negatives of old photographs. Let’s say you have big set of old family pictures. Because of the high cost to have someone scan those pictures, it could save you a lot of cash doing it yourself. If you take them to a place like Wal-Mart, you will get a low resolution scan. With the correct scanner, you can get some high resolution scans. Higher resolution means more pixels per inch.  Typically, you scan a picture at 600 dots per inch (DPI) or higher, up to 1200 dpi.  The hight resolution, the more detail is stored in the file.  That means bigger and more detailed scans.

Another reason for having a film scanner is to scan your photographs. Taking pictures with a film camera is a lot of fun. And a lot of people do this type of work for a living. I know we have digital cameras now, but they are not the same as using a film camera.

Some flatbed scanners come with either an add-on attachment for scanning film/transparencies or have some type of drawer arrangement that opens to accommodate standard film sizes (most are limited to 35mm film only). The film scanning attachment that comes with some flatbed scanners is probably fine for the home user that just wants to scan a negative here and there but the results will not be anything close to what could be obtained with a dedicated film scanner. It’s just not possible to create a single purpose scanner that can both scan paper and scan film well. The software provided with the flatbed scanner will probably also be quite lacking when dealing with film scans.

Working with an film strip adapter for negatives and transparencies to scan on your flatbed scanner would be okay for a quick and dirty job.  But for better results, it would be a lot better to use a dedicated film scanner for the job.  These typically scale upwards from 1200dpi to 2400dpi native resolution (that means it scans without any software enhancement).