scanning half frame

I know from reading past forums on the old DP, that you can use a plustek to scan half-frame. But my question is, given the '35mm negative holder' for a plustek, how do you do it?

Sure, I just feed the length of negative into the negative holder but since I am looking at vertical and not horizontal negatives with a half frame, the negative holder provided by Plustek isn't going to correctly show all 10 half frames that might be able to fit in the given length of the holder. The holder naturally has plastic strips that separate a regular 35mm negative. Does anyone make a half-frame holder that will fit a plustek?

At the moment I have taken a regular 35mm plustek holder and have cut/spliced off the dividers that separate each horizontal negative. This provides me with a negative holder totally void of any dividers/separaters. That works, but I have to guess as I feed the holder into the scanner. I have to guess, scan...adjust etc... It doesn't bother me that I lose a bit on the top/bottom, but just trying to do this process more efficiently.

It might depend on the camera and hence the film spacing, but when I’ve scanned half frame on a Plustek I’ve just scanned two frames at a time. Two fit in a normal 35mm frame (this was an Olympus Pen EE-2 and a Yashica Samurai). You can (apparently) get problems if there’s a big difference in exposure between two frames, but I never encountered that.

I have a WIDELUX and encountered the difference in exposure. That can be a problem for sure. I have tried to stitch the two Widely to create a panoramic but due to exposure differences it doesn't work too well.. I should leave in the spacing perhaps?

But I will try to look at this issue by scanning two negatives. Still an interesting dilemma .... jim

I'm sure you're aware that copying them with a digital camera is another option.

Yes I am aware of that....Negative Supply etc... I have talked with them but just have decided to stick with the Plustek etc... I have a couple of Plustek so have $ invested in that set up...

Any half-frames I've copied or scanned were slides, so cannot offer any advice. Good luck!

These are a couple of examples - one from the PEN EE-3 (thought it was a EE-2!) and one from a Samurai. The EE3 scans were done as a normal 35mm scan, for the Samurai I used the 35mm holder and then scanned a much smaller frame in SilverFast. Note that in the PEN the film goes left-right, in the Samurai it goes vertically.

PEN EE3

Samurai

You scanned in Plustek/silverFast but did both scan at the same time and in one 35mm frame? How much of the top/bottom was lost?

Don't think this is the ideal answer, but an Epson flatbed would solve this problem. It holds 35mm neg strips with no dividers, and if it can't "find" the frames when you preview scan, you can select them manually.

Aaron

Aaron...I do have access to one and yes, that might be the approach I will take..... thanks, jim

It’s quite a while since I did those and I’ve no longer got the Plustek connected to check, but I think the answer is “not a lot”. If you look at upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Half-Frame_4442.jpg/1280px-Half-Frame_4442.jpg you can see that full frame is 8 sprocket holes long and half frame is 4. So if you scan two frames you can scan as much of the (two frames + frame divider) as you can of a single frame (which IIRC isn’t quite 36mm x 24mm on the Plustek).

When I did the Yashica scan I did the same thing but only selected a single frame at a time and rotated through 90 degrees, so they look more conventional.

You will lose a lot of resolution compared to a film scanner though (in a small format to start with)

Looks good then....I'll load up the half-frame and give it a shot...jim

I found that my Epson flatbed didn't have enough resolution to give a good scan from full 35mm or half-frame film.
So I used a camera with a macro lens. The aim, as when making a darkroom B&W print, is to resolve the grain.

The camera that I used was the Sigma sdQH, which has a Foveon sensor giving roughly the same resolution as a normal 50 Megapixel sensor.

This is from half-frame film (one of the Olympus Pen cameras).

Unless one prefers grain...likes grain...no scratch that;.....LOVES grain :-)

Where the Sigma shines…and where the resolution benefit over Bayer lies is in colour information. For b&w, that benefit is greatly reduced. The Sigma in question has nowhere near 50mp of resolving power. See below how the Sigma compares to 50mp Bayer and 45mp Bayer.

While it is a great camera, the resolution benefits for b&2 are often great.y inflated above reality