I got a home scanner, a Reflecta Crystalscan 7200 (known as Pacific Image PrimeFilm 7200 in the U.S.). It’s a dedicated 35mm film scanner that should be a bit on the lower-end of the spectrum. I have been using it to re-scan some negatives, on the left you can see (a small part of) a scan I made with SilverFast SE 9, without doing any post production. On the right you can see the scan the lab sent me.

To be honest I am quite blown away and find it it very unexpected that the home scanner seems to do a much better job. The colors seem accurate to me (on an auto profile). The resolution appears quite a bit higher, even though both images have the same dimensions and the image seems sharper! And I haven’t even used this scanner at the highest resolution, this is a 2400 dpi scan.

What do you think?

  • @coherent_ramblingEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    In theory a lab scan should be better, right? They’ve got the expensive equipment and trained personnel. But in reality, that equipment might be poorly maintained (and getting elderly, since it’s probably 20+ years old at this point), and that staff might not be trained well, or might not care about your pictures all that much.

    I started DSLR scanning this year, and I’m really happy with the results. Prior to that, I’d sent rolls to a few different labs online. My best results so far were from Memphis Film Lab, and I would definitely recommend his service, but I didn’t care for his color corrections. That’s fine, he has an ordering option to not make any corrections, but in order to have leeway to make your own corrections, you may want to pay extra for the 16-bit TIFF scans and deal with 140-MB files. I can DSLR scan, get 20-MB 14-bit compressed RAW files and tweak the colors to my heart’s content. I don’t have quite as much resolution as Mr. Memphis’ scans, but it’s more than enough.

  • Bille747English
    2•1 year ago

    Yeah! The one on the left looks 100x better than on the right. It looks like they applied a heavy grain filter and looks really bad.