Scanning 1/2 frame film to CD delimma

[camera.bear]

My understanding is that when the PEN series was developed, Olympus took care to make sure that the film could be developed without a proplem using standard processing. The PEN EE manual states that "The film is processed in the same way, through the same places as other 35mm film."

My local Walgreens has done a great job dealing with my half frame film. I just advise them and they scan two images to one file. It is easy to separate and resize these in Photoshop. They cut the negatives without incident.

 

[Doug]

I'll second the suggestion of making friends with the lab tech. The local branch of my lab produces lower-res scans than the main lab. But the main lab's automated machinery is confused by half-frame's many frame divisions... their results are two frames on each scan, but the spacing is off, always cropping a bit off both sides or ok on one frame and losing more off the far side of the other. Very hit or miss as to usability.

The gal at the local branch hand-scanned the rolls for me so that I had a separate scan for each frame, centered in a full-frame size scan that I could later crop. So I had a good scan of every image, but at lower resolution. Halved further of course by the necessary cropping. But good enough for seeing what I had, and for forum uploads.

But now that lab has closed their local branch in my town, and "my gal" lost her job. I will have to talk with the Costco folks when I go in there next...

 

[JoeV]

Although I have processed my own B/W film, I've gotten away from it, and like the convenience of XP-2. It's the scanning and printing that's the problem with local labs.

Last week I dusted off my Beseller 23C enlarger and printed half a dozen half-frame XP-2 shots to 5x7, on glossy fiber paper. The results are so much better than the mini-lab prints. Now I need to convince myself to process my own B/W film again; the problem has always been dust collecting on the film as it dries; I don't have my own drying cabinet. But after seeing the spots and scratches on the XP-2 negs processed by the mini-lab, I can't do any worse myself.

~Joe