How we scan slide film

One of the great benefits with slide film is that you have a perfect reference for the colour and exposure for your shot right there on the slide.

Colour negative film on the other hand is always down to the scanner’s interpretation, and each scanner handles colour negative film slightly differently.

The only thing that influences how your slide film looks is the strength and temperature of the light behind it.

The Scanner

We scan slide film a little differently to most labs.

As you might already know, the two most popular industry scanners are the Noritsu and Fuji Frontier.

The Fuji is a great scanner in its own right, but simply doesn’t have a strong enough light source to scan slide film as well as the Noritsu HS-1800.

Typically when scanning film, a lab technician would feed a roll of film into a scanner and as each frame is corrected, the machine will scan that frame, and slowly feed the roll out.

Unfortunately, this method doesn’t let you look at the original slide as you’re scanning it, so you’re really just scanning blind.

By storing RAW scanning data locally, The Noritsu HS-1800 lets us feed your film, sleeve it then reference it on a light table before we make any adjustments to your scans.

This is how we get as close to the original slide as possible.

Frame by frame.

Examples

These shots of E100 are a great example. The scanner gets quite close on it’s initial scan, but a slight shadow adjustment, yellow and red channel adjustment was needed to match the original slide.

We always scan transparency film on the Noritsu by default, so no need to ask!

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