How do you cut your negatives?

Not happy with other alternatives, I have decided to give the Tonic Studios/Tim Holtz 6¼" mini guillotine cutter a try.
It's inexpensive; about $20 brand new, shipping included. I will report back on how well it works in this application.


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Chris
 
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I just tried a Matin film cutter for the first time, and it worked great. In some ways, I thought the JJC product looked nicer, but the need for USB power and spare blades meant more clutter too, and I wanted to avoid that.
 
I cut my first roll of film with the mini-guillotine cutter.

It's fast and not fussy to use like some other options.
IMO less handling means less chance of scratching.
I expect the large blade will stay sharp a long time.

Chris
 
ChrisPlatt said:
I cut my first roll of film with the mini-guillotine cutter.

It's fast and not fussy to use like some other options.
IMO less handling means less chance of scratching.
I expect the large blade will stay sharp a long time.

Chris
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A safe bet--I've been using the same pair of scissors for at least the last 20 years for this over a lightbox and they still work perfectly.
 
Scissors, lightbox and a steady hand.

I nip the left side corners of each five-image strip at 45 degrees so they slide into negative sleeves more easily. I think I got that tip from Chris Crawford's website?

And I always shoot 35 frames on a roll so it fits into a Printfile 35-7B page with no extra scraps hanging around.
 
Cascadilla said:
A safe bet--I've been using the same pair of scissors for at least the last 20 years for this over a lightbox and they still work perfectly.
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I finally broke down and retired my old Bogen light box with fluorescent lighting and switched to a flat LED artist's light pad. Much lighter and brighter. Under $20.

Bonus - you can use it as a makeshift transparency/negative backlight for scanning on a conventional flatbed scanner. Perfect? Nope, but a useful hack nonetheless.
 
With scissors. And as others pointed out, it's a good idea to use a known pair of sharp scissors with thin blades. In my early days of film developing I discovered some strange marks at the borders of my negatives, sometimes even affecting the margins of the images themselves, even if the cut did not touch them. It turned out that the scissors had warped and marred the negatives. I've been using a dedicated pair of scissors since then and never had any further problems.
 
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