Ever thought of digitising all those old films with photos you shot using your first (and second, and third) camera? Or the videos you enjoyed some time ago but today you find it either too cumbersome to set all things up to view them or the equipment needed to play them back is long gone? Ever thought that you should preserve those memories somehow? Maybe you even tried and found out that film photos, digitised by some generic service providers look worse on your screen than they look on the old prints? Or that your precious video footage viewed on modern computer screen has either terribly ugly looking jagged comb-like lines all around or looks much more blurry than it looked on your old TV back then?

This is an experience many people went through and eventually gave up. But most of them didn’t understand that it doesn’t have to be like what they experienced, though. That one can actually have old photos looking better today than they looked when they first saw them. That video footage can look better on today’s high-res screen than it looked on that CRT television back then.

Main reasons for giving up are that people find getting truly satisfactory results being:
  • too difficult
  • too expensive
  • too time consuming
  • depending on equipment that is no longer available for purchase or rental
  • depending on software that no longer runs on current hardware
  • depending on skills that require sizeable time and efforts to acquire
  • impossible with generic services available
Of course there are also people who were and are satisfied with typical results. I think the vast majority actually is. I don’t have any offer for them. My offer is dedicated to like-minded nerds who just can’t sleep well when they know that something could be done better even at a price but still without robbing the bank or winning the lottery prize.

This means if we talk film scanning, there are no flatbed scanners used here. And there are no xxx-tek (mustek, plustek, pierdustek, scantek, you name it) film scanners used either. Only latest produced and increasingly more hard to come by, top of the line dedicated film scanners from Nikon, Minolta and real (as opposed to "virtual") drum scanner from Heidelberg for big format. When we talk of video conversions and archiving, in no way we talk about a typical “PC VHS-to-DVD Transfer" type of things. All video equipment (except some consumer-only formats) is a well-maintained broadcast grade stuff that cost big thousands not so long ago. Signals are flowing in a controlled studio level environment. No cheap cabling with impedance mismatches. No cheap "video to usb" type of A/D converters. No cheap PC based post-processing software...

What do we talk about then? Two examples:

1) High contrast medium format (120) negative film at 4000 dpi with no post processing whatsoever. Raw (only converted to JPEG), uncropped, especially with no "sharpening" at ALL! (JPEG - about 22MiB!)


2014-01_120_001n_09



2) Regular small format (135 / 35mm) negative film at 3000 dpi, with "standard" post processing / sharpening applied (JPEG - about 2.1MiB)

Scan-140310-0040


If anything of that rises your heartbeat rate and you are interested in film (about any format) or video (about any format) digitising / archiving you may want to contact me.