Negative Supply Essential 35mm Film Scanning Kit | CAMERA SCANNING COMPARISON 

I made a brush using two anti static vinyl brushes glued em together and works well has saved me a lot of time for a total of 16 bucks

love the sane way that you have presented a complex topic.

This thing is SUPER sweet!!! I'm going to need to pick one of these up for sure!

You should try out the new Valoi easy35 system. It's similar to the old school slide scanning setups except that it has build in light source. If you value simplicity and ease of setup and size then it would probably be the best option for 35mm film.

There were a lot of great pictures included in this video! I've been looking into getting into scanning film like this but all of the kits are really expensive and I have two flatbed Epson scanners so I end up not doing it but after watching your video, I think the Negative Supply Essential kit looks good. Awesome video.

"Oh yeah after 8 years Kodak announces the new Super 8 cam!" *jumps cut* my fav bit of this video

lol, I had the same reaction to browsing their site for the options. But I appreciate that they make quality stuff that overall is reasonably priced.

I am using the Valoi setup with a vintage commercial copy stand.. =) I like the Cinestill light. I have been using Darktable (I use Linux, but there it is available on Windows and Mac). The film conversion module works great, but has a steep learning curve.

This kit consists of a wonky $30 china copy stand, a $20 light source and 3D printed frames for $250?? You can get a whole 3D printer and material for that money!

Thanks for sharing! I’d be curious to know if you’ve tried the Negative Supply carriers with the CineStill light source and how that might work? Thanks again

When I seen the price of their stuff, I couldn't help buy laugh. I know it is probably well made - but come on. I ended up using parts from an old out of use 3D printer (aluminum extrusions, lead screw Z axis parts, etc) and made my own easy adjustable stand. I attached my old Sony Nex7 with an arca swiss mount with built in level. I bought a adjustable brightness/white balance LED light off amazon ($35) and 3D printed a holder for it. I 3D printed my 35mm and 120 holders with & without borders. Works great, and I have have very little invested. I could build another stand for less than $75 bucks in extrusion and printer parts off Amazon. The 3D printed negative holders took minimal prep and work great. The biggest expenditure of the whole endeavor was buying Negative Lab Pro - and I have something similar to the product Negative Supply sells for thousands.

Noah -- thank you for the thorough rundown of this system -- in under 30 minutes! Quick questions -- what adapter do you have for the vintage Canon lens to MFT mount, and what specific Canon lens do you use? Cheers!

Near the end of the video when you mention who this is for, the dedicated more or less, i realized what it can do a flatbed scanner can not. Say you shoot colour c41 and process it in vlack and white chemistry. The negatives are too dense (crap) to scan. But the photo enlarger handles it because you can test strip for minutes even. Using the camera scanner would give you the same benefit. You can do full manual exposure and capture what you need. I have had a lot of grief trying to scan cross processed stuff that, well, should bever be cross processed, but I see this working.

As you assert, Noah, very cool. I have a shed load of exposed 35mm colour & B & W film stock. For $250.00 that's not a bad investment choice, given what's in the kit. Certainly, it's not the most sophisticated accessory on the market, but I suspect it will cover most bases. Great resurgence indeed. Take it easy, & a happy Christmas to you & yours ! Andrew 🙂

Its really nice to see so many camera scanning options! I would personally go with Valoi:s products as it is easier for me to order and get the products as they are located in Europe and ordering stuff from the US to Sweden is a mess when it comes to customs extra fees and taxes!

This makes me want to 3D print something like this, but with a sprocket that drives the film through. Then have an Arduino advance the film and remotely control the DSLR.

I briefly built a setup using the 1st gen Essential Film Holder and a makeshift copy stand using a hardwood board and "black iron pipe" from the hardware store (the kind used for running natural gas inside a home.) Camera mounted to a Nisi macro rail; useful for focusing and attached via standard Manfrotto "super clamp". I bought a Schneider enlarger lens and adapted that to M42 with another adapter for my DSLR. And some kind of light source someone recommend; runs of A/C or old Sony camcorder batteries. If only I could find it all since I moved. Completely agree the Neg Supply product line and its marketing is a confusing jumble.

ngl, I've been thinking of getting a film duplicator and using a more modern light source. Just depends on if one shows up for a decent price in a thrift shop.

Interesting video, I don’t really know much about the NS products because every time someone recommends it too me, I go to their page, see the price and decide to dip. I “scan” my negs with a Nikon D810 mounted with a c-clamp to a “copy stand” I made from a pipe I mounted onto a cutting board. I then designed a film carrier that I 3d printed. I use an old manually focused macro lens and a remote trigger. I think the whole thing cost me less than $100 minus the camera and lens which I pretty much leave mounted 24/7 because I almost never shoot digital anymore. Will I get something nicer like this that you showed in the video in the future? Maybe, but this has worked for about two dozen rolls so far and I’m currently designing an attachment so that the film goes through a little anti-static wipe before going into the carrier to improve on the dust problem. Anyways, big fan of your videos. Also always nice to see another Torontonian out there shooting film and loving it.

If I'm a full frame shooter with (limited) budget that may need to occasionally do 35 film scan, I would seriously consider those legacy slide duplicator tube in the first place. It's plentiful & CHEAP, but maybe good enough to get the job done. That might be only what you'd ever need.😁 However if you're going to deal with several other film format this kind of film scanning kit would be more sensible of course.

What software are you using to to tether the camera tp the Macbook Pro? Nice presentation.

Somehow I ended up with three film cameras and zero digital cameras atm. Haha, that’s okay for now though. I like the scans from my lab. When i get a digital camera again I’m definitely looking into a set up like this. Not that scans are that expensive, but, at $16 for high res TIFF scanning a set up like this would pay for itself in like a year and a half at my rate of shooting.

Did you have any issues with the light source being uneven?

I'm dreaming here, but do you think a system like this could be developed for 8mm and 16mm? A reel on each side and some kind of frame by frame auto feed with a synced remote trigger? It's probably too niche for it to make sense for Negative Supply to develop... but it sure would benefit the community more than a $5K S8 camera.

For 35mm this is perfect. For 120 my v600 does the job.

Cool video dude! I scan my B&W film myself here @ home. Being an engineer I made my own film holder out of cardboard stock, felt, & sheet plastic in 35mm & 120MF on the same holder! I just use my Manfrotto tripod with the 90 degree center column. I use a 5D III and he EF 24-205 f4L with extension tubes and I get great hi-res scans. I invert them in LR and thats all I need, I will not pay $100 for a program!!! One question, when are you going to do some more film reviews?! CHEERS!

Negative Supply has really bad "documentation", what components are necessary and which are meant to be used together. I have more questions than answers after going to their website. Valoi is much better in this regard - and cheaper here in Europe when compared to the respective Negative Supply stuff (Valoi does have an essential kit, too, just no stand included). I do have the Essential film holder, and I'm fine with it (for now), because I do more 4x5 than 135 or 120 film. Camera scanning is the way to go in the long run if you need to do it yourself (because no suitable lab in reach, or scan quality from the lab is not what you need - or you do 4x5 like me, where lab scans are just crazy expensive). My experience with dedicated film scanners is rather bad (and it is incredibly slow - camera scanning is *fast*). I use the Olympus Pen F with 80 MP high-res mode and the 30 mm macro to scan my 4x5 negatives - and it works great (it reveals the fine grain of Ektar 100 on 4x5, no more resolution needed ;-)). I already had the Pen F before I started to use it for scanning, so this was the cheapest way possible; if not, I would most likely look out for a used E-M5II or III for the job (the E-M5II offering 60 MP high-res would be fine, but for dual-use I would go with the E-M5III). Oh, and I'm going to use SmartConvert over NLP in the future, because it is stand-alone (I do hate to depend on Lightroom in the long run), and tests have shown better results with less effort using SmartConvert (I still have to test NLP3 if results have improved over NLP2, but the Lightroom issue remains).

I tried scanning 120 negatives this way, but decided the process, especially stitching, was too slow/painful and went with a used Epson scanner instead. I should try one more time to compare results against the scanner.

For my film scanning i use one of those 30 buck kits that are only some plastic parts to hold the film over a light-source (of undisclosed CRI, yet alone color temperature). To hold my digital camera in place, i mounted the scanning kit and the camera on a dual-rail flash holder bracket thingie - Its a metal rail where you have one mount in the middle (goes on the tripod/lightstand) and two mounts on either end (to mount speedlight flashes on). I have that on a mini tripod on my desk and it works reasonably well. But the plastic holder included only really holds a strip of 6 35mm frames, which makes it sort of fiddly / time consuming to scan all frames. Now, the thing that gets me banned: I still feed in the entire roll and pull it through, risking scratches for comfort/scanning speed 🙃 I did in fact consider negative supply and valoi for the nice things you stated: a light source with a good CRI rating, parts meant for each other, film advancers, brushes for dust removal - all the nice things you showed. Then i looked at the price, and yeah, that's tough. Where things get interesting is medium and even large format. Because there are physical limits in terms of "macro reproduction size of your lens" vs "the size of the negative to scan" vs "the size of your digital cameras sensor" vs "focus range of the macro lens". You can end up in a situation where you either have to stitch a panorama (time consuming) or zoom out and not use all of your sensor size (sub-optimal quality). The technical aspects of macro photography have to be considered, I certainly overlooked them when starting camera scanning. Camera scanning is amazing for 35mm, because it's fast and you want fast when you have to scan 72 or 108 frames after you finished bulk developing film :) Everything bigger than 35mm gets thrown into the V850, camera scanning is not really feasible in these formats.

They increased the price to $300 :/

😉 "promosm"