What is the future of scanning at home going to look like? We will explore the future of home scanning thoroughly by looking at the history of film scanning, discussing how scanners work as well as some contemporary problems with designing new scanners while providing solutions for the future.
Let me preface this pixl-latr review with a confession that I am spectacularly impatient. I’m not restless, and I’m not in an unreasonable hurry. Those things are sort of incompatible with shooting film, right? If a task takes time, that’s fine. But I have no patience waiting for something that I don’t need to wait for. I don’t mind me slowing me down, but something else slowing me down will very quickly find itself in the bin.
An old friend recently asked if I could digitize some 35mm slides of a coastal Maine motel her family once owned. She’d researched the commercial cost of scanning, and before biting that bullet, wanted to see what I could do.
I immediately pulled my Olympus C-8080 WZ (Wide Zoom) bridge camera off the shelf. It takes superb “Super Macros” and my friend only wanted to email the scans to relatives. The camera’s 8-megapixel files would be more than enough for that, and I ran some quick tests. It proved excellent for quickly and easily digitizing film… and my friend loved the results!
Shortly after my Using a Mobile Phone And a Free App To Scan Negatives article came out in March, Lomography announced they were releasing a new type of scanning device for scanning film, the DigitaLIZA+ and the DigitaLIZA Max.
As someone who now does 99% of their scanning with a mobile phone, I was intrigued by these two new scanning products and pre-ordered the ditiaLIZA Max.
The only difference between the DigitaLIZA+ and Max is that the Max comes with a smartphone copy stand. The DigitaLIZA+ is aimed at people who really only use a DSLR/mirrorless camera and tripod to scan their negatives, whereas the Max gives you the option of a camera or mobile phone because of the included copy stand.
When I first got back into analogue photography back in 2015, the biggest problem for me was how do I get these analogue images into a digital format to post on either a blog, Flickr or Instagram. Yes, I could get the lab I was sending to, to scan the images but this was costly and also there may only be half-a-dozen images that are worth scanning plus I was developing my own B & W and so that needed to be scanned at home.
