Scanning negatives with a mirrorless camera, cheaply
Flatbed scanners that handle film well are expensive, and the lab charges add up quickly. A camera with a macro lens does the job faster and, for 35mm, about as well as anything I could afford. This is the cheap version of the setup I have been using for a year.
The parts
- A mirrorless body. Mine is old and 20 megapixels is plenty for 35mm
- A used manual macro lens with an adapter, about the price of four rolls of film
- An old tablet showing a plain white screen at full brightness as the light source
- A sheet of anti-reflective glass from a picture framer to keep the negatives flat
- A bookshelf. The camera sits on the shelf above, pointing down through a gap
What matters
Alignment is everything. If the sensor is not parallel to the film, one corner goes soft. I used a small mirror on the glass: when the camera can see its own lens centred in the mirror, it is square. It takes five minutes and saves an evening of re-shooting.
Dust is the other enemy. Glass collects it, negatives collect it, the tablet screen collects it. A blower brush, a clean cotton glove and a rule that I scan right after the film is dry, before it spends a week in a sleeve, help more than any software.
Settings
Base ISO, f/8, manual focus with magnification on a patch of grain, and a two-second timer so the shelf stops wobbling. I expose so the brightest part of the film base is just below clipping, then invert and adjust the curve later. Black and white is easy; colour negatives take more work to get the orange mask out, and I am still not happy with my results there.
Total cost was well under the price of a used dedicated scanner, and a roll takes about twenty minutes from start to finish.