“Scan all your 35mm film photos easily using your smartphone” This is what Lomography promises that their new smartphone film scanner can do. Have they succeeded? That remains to be seen.
I have been shooting film for years without scanning my own negatives, for two reasons: limited workspace in our apartment and no time and, to be honest, no desire to learn enough digital photo editing to get the colours of the scan right. The Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner solves the first problem but not, so far, the second.
The scanning process
The scanner is small, light-weight and extremely easy to operate:
The scanner consists of a base, three stackers and a top part. The base contains a light panel, two AA batteries, a film slit and a wheel to advance the film. The top part consists of a clamp with which to fasten your phone and an opening where the camera lens goes. The stackers go between the base and the top part; you want to use just enough stackers that the distance between the camera and the film is as small as possible while leaving the camera able to focus. Using two stackers is recommended for iPhones, and works very well with my HTC as well.
Once the scanner is assembled, all you have to do is to switch on the scanner and the camera on your phone, insert the film into the film slit, and voila – as you advance the film, each exposure will appear on your phone screen ready to be photographed.
After scanning: what now?
As expected, this is where I ran into trouble.
Lomography have promised us an app to go with the scanner, which supposedly will make it very easy to invert the negative image and fix the colours. The app is an important reason why I backed the Kickstarter in the first place, so I certainly hope it will be as easy as they say – but my recent experiences with the alternative app they suggest and with Photoshop make me realise what a big task Lomography has taken on with this.
Black and white
I figured I’d start with the easiest – black and white film – so I dug out the only black and white roll I have ever shot (from back when I was a teenager and went on a trip to a cabin in the forest with some friends). Scanning and editing this was exactly as easy as I want it to be.
Lomography recommends PhotoEditor as an alternate app, so I used this to convert the image with the Invert filter under Effect:
A final crop and the resulting image looks like this, nice and sharp and entirely good enough quality for me:
Colour
This is where things get difficult.
Here is the result of a colour negative scan after I applied the same procedure in PhotoEditor as described above:
No matter how much I tinker with the white balance settings on my phone or with colour adjustments in PhotoEditor, I cannot get a satisfactory result.
After scanning some more negatives, I even went so far as to download a trial version of Photoshop, in spite of being a Photoshop novice entirely. After much frustrated cursing, trial-and-error and googling for tutorials, I ended up with this, which is the result of inversion + following this white balance correction tutorial.
I guess I’m happy with this, even though there is a slight blue cast to the image that I haven’t been able to get rid of.
To sum up: the Lomography scanner is delightfully easy to use and takes up next to no room. If you have an iPad or similar, you can even use it to scan medium format film. If the app does what it promises, Lomography have succeeded very well indeed. If it doesn’t, I’m no worse off when it comes to digital editing than I would have been with any other negative scanner.
I would love to hear how other film users solve these issues – do you scan your own negatives? Any tips and tricks I should know for making the colour conversion easier?
— All the best from Jenny.
Jenny, how fascinating is this! I have to admit I send my film to developed and scanned up in Manchester, a process which can take up to a week or even longer so I particularly I look forward to seeing how this invention progresses!
Wow, I would have thought that living in London of all places would mean access to proper labs actually in the city, but I guess not!
Thank you for this review Jenny, I had read the announcement from Lomography and was quite excited and if the app they promise does arrive than I will give it a try for my older developed film which is has not been scanned. At the moment between mailing the film and waiting for scanned images, it is taking longer than a week, but the results are reliable…
Let us know how it works for you if you do buy it! I don’t know if I prefer delayed and reliable results, or immediate and unreliable results with the added thrill of doing it myself. Probably the latter actually 🙂
The app is now available at itunes. From the few reviews there are many bugs yet to be fixed, like any app. It can only get better from here. Camera+ works well for now. The scanner is great as it is mobile.
Is the app really on iTunes now?? Wow – it’s not available for Android yet and hasn’t been announced on the microsite, so I guess it’s buggy enough yet that they want to keep it a little quiet. I love the fact that the scanner is so mobile as well!
…and just now I got an e-mail from them where they announce the app. I actually really like the fact that they release it now in spite of the bugs and will keep working on it based on people’s feedback.
I am totally intrigued by this Jenny. Keep us posted on how it’s going.
this is really cool Jenny…i’m glad you made the leap and gave it a try. i’m with Christy when i say that i’ll be watching, and wondering how it all unfolds.
I have this scanner and the app for my iPhone 5. The app is pretty limited and buggy at the moment. There are five film type options for inverting. Right now when I try to invert my colour scans, there is a significant blue hue to them. They don’t look a lot like my actual prints. This is the first release, and it was rushed to get out, so hopefully it will get a lot better with updates.
Thanks for sharing your experiences! I’m sure it will get a lot better; they do seem to be making it a priority. I can’t wait to have the app available for Android..!! 🙂
Hi Jenny,
My name is Erica and I am a journalism student in New Zealand. I am currently writing an article about the smartphone scanner and I was wondering if I would possibly be able to ask you a few questions about it and how you have found it!
If you could please email me at ericamikaela@gmail.com that would be great!
I look forward to hearing from you.
Hi Erica,
I’m glad you found the Mortal Muses! I’ll send you an e-mail later today.
If you’re on Android, you could use the free HELMUT app for scanning process — http://HelmutApp.com . You would be able to fix the blue cast and perform many other tweaks directly on your phone.
Thanks for the tip; I’ll look into it.