I was asked recently by a friend why getting negatives scanned was any better than using a digital camera to snap a quick picture of a negative with a backlight. I thought that was a good question and there is really no answer as to which one is better overall.
It of course depends on what you want from the image, much like choosing between a point and shoot or fully fledged manual digital camera with expensive prime lenses. Are you after a quick snap of an occasion, or do you want to capture a mood, or feeling?
With the development of more and more sophisticated smartphone cameras, we can not only get really decent images of the world around us, but savvy app developers have also utilised these cameras to get people to ‘digitise’ their negatives. Simply hold up the negative to a flat, even light-source and take a picture through the app which will then invert it for you and save it as a ‘ready-to-share’ positive image!
I wanted to get a comparison to show you, so I used my phone to take a picture of a 5×4″ black & white negative that I’d recently taken as a test shot.
As you can see, this is a perfectly sharable image. Its captured the full range from the darks to the highlights (ignore the silhouette of my thumb in the upper left corner), but it is not the crispest image ever taken.
Compare that against the version that was scanned using a dedicated scanner and converted manually at our lab.
No even though this was scanned at 1600dpi, it was then saved out at 300dpi and re-sized to make the image smaller and more ‘portable’ by about 75%. As you can see, it is much crisper and more even. Though of course the trade off is that it took time to achieve; around 15-20 minutes compared to around 30 seconds.
I am sure that with a better backlight, less ambient light & a better way of mounting the negative, I could have gotten a much better example through the smartphone method. But I wanted to see how it turned out from just following the instructions from the app developers.
I won’t name the app I used, because there are plenty out there for all of the major operating systems. I may in the future do a more in-depth review of some of them, using a high quality scan as a baseline for comparison.
What do you think, would you use these apps to get your films into the digital realm? If so, for what purposes & do you think they can ever replace more traditional scanning methods? Let me know in the comments.
