Scanning advice requested

An acquaintance of mine sent me the below note.  It's been ages since I've scanned film (35 mm color transparencies, with a Nikon Coolscan).  Does anyone have any suggestions, given that we're talking about B&W negatives and some sort of (presumably long-discontinued) large format film size, either with regard to scanners that can be purchased to handle this format and/or reliable scanning services that can handle this?

Thanks.

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I was going through boxes of stuff I brought back when we closed up the
family home, and opened a box that contains negatives that were taken
(and developed, I am sure - I know he had darkroom stuff at that age) by
my Grandfather when he was still in his late teens. His notes on each
negative include the details of the shot, with the dates noted in 1918
and 1919.  The majority (a stack maybe 2" high) are untrimmed negatives
are about 3-1/2" x 6-5/8" (approx 90x170mm. There are also some trimmed
negatives that are 110x80cm.  I tried to research to get an idea what
size film they might have been, but didn't find anything that seemed to
fit that size.

I have no idea what pictures are actually on any of these, so I stuck
one or two on a light box, and used a phone app to view them as if they
were developed. That app doesn't show a terribly crisp rendition, but
whether that is the negative or the process, I don't know. But I can
tell that at least some of them are family members, and I really want to
be able to identify those negatives that I should keep.

It seems that Epson makes a film scanner that can handle such large
format negatives, but it isn't cheap!  I have a huge number of slides
and other stuff that really should be digitized, and if using that big
Epson scanner is feasible, I will bite the bullet and buy it. I am just
wondering, though, if there are other options for this large format
stuff since the rest of the negatives I have are more standard sizes and
might be able to be handled by a less expensive scanner in the Epson line.

The Epson film scanners can do this.  There are models from $220 to $1300 with varying features and resolutions.

I am not sure if this will help you. Check it out.

https://epson.com/For-Work/Scanners/Photo-and-Graphics/Epson-Perfection-V800-Photo-Color-Scanner/p/B11B223201

The larger stuff in theory could be handled by re-photographing on a lightbox with a macro lens- the advantage is that one click and you are done. The disadvantage is you don't have access to the cleanup tools like digital ICE to automatically remove dust etc and automatic inversion of the image which you have in the scanner and its software. The disadvantage of the scanners is of course the scan time.

The film formats sound unusual, the 90 x 170mm stuff may have started out as 113 or 114 film? the widest roll film seems to have been the 116 film which is 2.5" wide or 63.5mm unfortunately this means you'd probably need the V800 particularly for the bigger negatives.

I would suggest a lightbox and a loupe is a vital tool to decide which negatives to scan - you can get an idea of the condition and if it might be an interesting subject without having to setup and scan to see.

I would also suggest you probably don't need to use the full resolution of these scanners - given the likely resolution available in the original negative it is probably good for an A4 size print. If you scan at the equivalent of A3 at 300 dpi (~3500 x 4900) that is about 17 MP and will produce reasonable sized files with all or most of the resolution available from the negative.

A lot of early negatives like this are really quite low resolution as many people developed their own film and contact printed it and many cameras were only about good enough to produce a nice print by this method.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I'll pass this on to my acquaintance.

Designations 54 and 515 cover this size.

films sizes

John

Kerry wrote:Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.  I'll pass this on to my acquaintance.

I recently wrote an article covering this very topic for a family member, it became a longish project but I cover everything, from prints to negatives and slides, how to scan, how to digitize into the computer and various tools and adapters needed. I can send the pdf to anybody here if you send me a PM.

Basically, I believe the best method currently is to photograph the slide(s) with a macro lens using a high resolution camera. The set up costs less than $100 if you already have a macro lens.

Pradeep