Superior Film Scanners

In the digital age, it is important to preserve analog film in a digital format. As film ages, it can deteriorate and become damaged. One way to preserve the quality of film forever and prevent that deterioration from happing is through the use of film scanners.

One of the greatest benefits of film scanners is that they transmit high-resolution images created from the film directly to a computer hard drive. This bypasses the step of print making, which had to be done before the availability of this technology to the general public.

In the past, film prints would have to be scanned with a flatbed scanner. While these would reproduce the photographic image at a certain level of quality similar to the original print, flatbed scanners are inferior to film scanners in some very significant ways. For example, a person has the capability to alter the aspect ratio of the image from the original un-tampered with film. This would include information that would not necessarily appear on a print of the film.

Most film scanners also come with tools that allow a person to remove grain, scratches, dust particles, and other anomalies from film. Grain and defects like scratches can become extremely large and distracting when a piece of film is used to create a large sized image.

To produce a quality image from damaged or overly grainy film, some tinkering with the scan of the source material must be done. Doing such restoration work from a simple scan of a print would be much more complicated and time consuming. However, this process is much easier and produces a much more accurate image when an actual scan of the original film source material is used.

One method used to perform the clean up of film defects is through the complex process of infrared cleaning. This can be done because film is naturally transparent to light while things like dust and scratches are not. The dust particles and scratches can then be automatically removed from the digital image and replaced with information that matches surrounding information on the film.

Typically, most film scanners that are available to the general public can scan three different kinds of film. This includes the formats of 120 films, 35 mm, and film slides. However, lower priced models may only be able to scan 35 mm film. Higher end models, however, will include film loaders that can accept all three formats.


Tags: Film Scanners