The Best Scanner

How to get the most out of your film photography

I recently treated myself to a new scanner for my birthday and it’s the best photography purchase I ever did.

I love film photography, I’ve been doing it almost everyday for the past 2.5 years. I develop and scan my own negatives but scanning always was a pain. Until now.

Kodak Pakon f-135 Plus

Most of you will not know that scanner, because chances are, if you knew about it, you’d have bought it by now. It’s an mid-2000s film scanner that was used by labs. It’s inexpensive (for a film scanner), costing only $250. It can take a full 35mm roll of film, 24 or 36 exposures and scan it. In 5 minutes. With auto dust removal (Digital ICE).

When I read that description for the first time, I couldn’t believe it.

I played with it all day to day, now I’m a believer. And I can’t understand how I did not hear about that scanner before.

Having fancy cameras (and I’ve had lots of those) is nothing if you can’t get the most out of your negatives. And the amount of time that you spent scanning is less time taking photos. Having that scanner will produce better results but also help with my creativity as I will not be afraid of trying things differently, shooting more, and shooting in color (which I nearly stopped doing but now I want to do it more and more thanks to this scanner)

The Good

The scanner is fast and silent. It’s small-ish. The colors are amazing (light years away from my Minolta Dual Scan IV or the Epson V750 I used to have). It’s fairly inexpensive for a film scanner. It scans un-cut rolls of 35mm or strips of 4, 5 or 6 frames without interruption. It’s super easy to use and to get awesome results.

The Bad

It’s so good, you would love it to do more. But it doesn’t. No medium format support. Only 6 megapixels (3000x2000), not the best for prints. Only B&W or C41 (no E6 slides, mounted or not).

The Ugly

It’s not made anymore, so good luck finding one. Good luck having it repaired if something goes wrong. The software is from another time.

And yeah, it’s Windows only.

Windows XP only ☹

Thank you VMWare.

To finish, here is a comparaison of what I used to get with my Minolta Dual Scan IV, and what I get now with the Kodak Pakon. I’ll let you decide which is better.