Lomography Smartphone scanner - short impression

[kanzlr]

Hi there,

I just got my Lomography smartphone scanner. It really is just a small light table, big enough for a single 35mm image, a wheel to transport the film strip and stackable frames to you can adjust the camera/smartphone holder hight to accommodate for the minimum focusing distance of your smartphone.

Well, I did buy this thing mostly as an alternative to editing images on a light table, as I find this cumbersome for color negatives, less so for black and white. That, and I usually print a full index to be stored with my negatives, so it is easier for me to grasp the contents of the sleeves. This was a bit time consuming up till now, because I had to scan the full roll for that.

This is where the Lomo holder comes into play. It takes maybe a few minutes for a full roll to be digitized and showing up in my photo stream on the Mac. I then chose which images to scan with my real scanner, and I do an index print in Aperture using the negatives just captured on the phone.

For this it works REALLY well, but thats it. I would not use it for anything else, as a 1000 dpi scan with a dedicated scanner is fast and much much nicer to look at

The main drawbacks are iPhone and LomoScanner app inherent:

• the iPhone 4S does not focus close enough, so you have to crop heavily and lose a lot of resolution. My girlfriends Android phone is much better for this task due to its close focusing ability
• The LomoScanner app is super basic for now. You cannot limit the camera to base-ISO, thus the images are VERY grainy. You cannot manually adjust exposure, which is a bit of a chore. You cannot manually adjust colorbalance, etc.

With forthcoming updates to the LomoScanner app most of these things will be cured, but the bad minimum focusing distance of the iPhones camera of course hinders better resolution scans due to the need for cropping.


All in all I am happy with it, as it does what I wanted: act as a digital light table that already somewhat properly inverts color negatives and provides super quick images for an index print.

 

[kanzlr]

I just learned that the high-ISO "scan" is an iPhone "feature", as Apples SDK does not allow to alter ISO or chose a manual exposure at all…oh my.

 

[philipus]

Thanks for posting this Bernhard. Since I don't have a flatbed, I've been wondering about ways to quickly get images onto my computer in a contact sheet kind of way. This might just do the trick.

How much do you have to crop due to the minimum focusing distance?

cheers
philip

 

[Jamie123]

I've been wondering about ways to quickly get images onto my computer in a contact sheet kind of way. This might just do the trick.

Or, if you have a digital camera you could just buy a cheap lighttable, put your negs on there, snap a picture and then invert and adjust it on the computer. Certainly cheaper than this thing and higher quality, too.
If you don't want to buy a lighttable you can also just use your computer screen with a white background. I've done this and it works fairly well but for 35mm it's not ideal because you'll probably have to zoom in so much that it shows the screen pixels.

 

[kanzlr]

you have to crop pretty heavily to just 1.3 mpixel.
That, and ISO is pushed way too far, but thats the iPhones camera doing that automatically, no way for long exposures