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Posts Tagged ‘digitizing’

Kodak Digitizing Box service breathes life into old media with minimal effort

14 Oct

There’s no shortage of ways to digitize your old film photos, videos, taps, and audio recordings on mediums long extinct. But Kodak is hoping you’ll eschew other methods in favor of its new Kodak Digitizing Box.

As the name suggests, the Kodak Digitizing Box is a simple solution to bringing analogue content into the digital world through the careful hands of professionals. In Kodaks own words, “The Kodak Digitizing Box brings a modern version of Kodak’s yellow envelope back to customer door steps and aims to make the daunting task of digitizing aging media easy,”

The boxes, which arrived with a pre-paid shipping label for easy returns, are available in four sizes: 3 piece, 10 piece, 20 piece, and 40 piece, and are priced at $ 59.99, $ 169.99, $ 289.99, and $ 559.99, respectively. One “piece” can consist of an audio tape, video tape, roll of film, or 25 photos. The below image details what type of media is able to be digitized.

After the box is shipped off, you will begin to receive email notifications throughout the digitization process. Kodak says to allow up to five to six weeks for everything to be digitized.

Once the digitization is finished, the resulting content — and the original media sent in — is returned on DVDs, a USB thumb drive, or via digital downloads, depending on your preference.

To find out more, head on over to the Kodak Digitizing Box website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Nikon’s ES-2 film digitizing adapter for the D850 will finally ship in March

04 Mar

The ES-2 film digitizing adapter that Nikon introduced alongside the D850 DSLR back in August will finally ship at the end of March. The ES-2 has been available for pre-order since it was first announced, but the product is marked as ‘backordered’ on the Nikon USA website, and the official ship date has been slipping backwards.

The Film Digitize Adapter ES-2 is designed to be used by those wanting to digitize their 35mm negatives and transparencies using their digital SLR, and works by holding your film the correct distance away from a macro lens.

Nikon recommends using the ES-2 with the NIKKOR AF-S Micro 60mm F2.8, having designed the adapter to work easily with the minimum focusing distance of that lens. And while the ES-2 is compatible with a range of Nikon DSLRs, the company suggests pairing it with the D850 because of the camera’s high resolution and the built-in film digitizing mode, which automatically inverts the image and saves a digitial positive as a JPEG.

The Nikon Film Digitize Adapter ES-2 kit—which includes a film strip holder for negatives and transparencies, a slide holder for mounted slides, and a pair of 62mm adapter rings for use with different macro lenses—is due to cost $ 150. However, if you’re looking for a cheaper option, the old ES-1 is still available for $ 60, and designed to be used with the 55mm F2.8 Micro-Nikkor and the PK-13 tube.

For more information, visit the Nikon website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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The Nikon D850 can scan film using the new ES-2 digitizing adapter

25 Aug

There’s a neat trick baked into the new Nikon D850 that you may not have noticed yet. Hidden away among the many features broken down in the D850 announcement is this line:

Negative/Positive Scanning: With the optional ES-2 Film Digitizing Adapter and compatible Micro-NIKKOR lens, the camera enables super high-resolution digitizing of 35mm slides or negatives and converts them in-camera to positives

For Nikon shooters who occasionally get their film photography on, this is actually a pretty interesting and useful feature. Basically, the D850 allows you to eschew the film scanner, pop a Nikkor macro lens onto your DSLR—Nikon recommends the AF-S Micro NIKKOR 60mm f/2.8G ED—and take pictures of your negatives or slides using the FH-4 Strip Film Holder or FH-5 Slide Mount Holder.

The camera will then convert these into positives in-camera and save them as JPEGs. Sure, you’ll still want to use some sort of light table or flash to light the film up for the shot, but it’s quite convenient and definitely quicker than scanning.

The ES-2 was announced quietly alongside the D850 last night, will retail for $ 150, and is already available for pre-order on the Nikon website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Google’s new PhotoScan app makes digitizing prints super easy

16 Nov

There are plenty of existing methods for digitizing printed photos, and most of them fall on a spectrum between ‘arduous with good results’ and ‘quick with terrible results.’ Google’s new PhotoScan app aims to aims to bridge the gap with a method that’s easy and produces good results by employing computational photography. 

The free app, available now for Android and iOS, requires the user to place their photo on a flat surface. After snapping a reference frame, the app directs the user to move their phone around the image to capture more data and, critically, move around the glare that the photo is almost certainly reflecting.

After you’ve made a successful pass, the app will work its magic and spit out a digitized, glare-free rendition of your photo. Images can be saved to your phone’s camera roll and to the cloud. In less than a minute, you’ve got a shareable digital photo that’s way better than the quick-and-dirty version.

Decent scans of instant photos with minimal effort? Sign me up. I scanned these Instax prints with Google’s PhotoScan app and they are gloriously glare-free.

The app analyzes your photo and identifies reference points so it can merge multiple versions of the same image, and compares pixel-level details to judge which image is free of glare. It’s based on technology Google and MIT have been developing to help remove unwanted reflections and obstructions from photos.

The app automatically crops, straightens and rotates your photo, but you can rotate and adjust the corners after capture if needed. My first few tries show surprisingly good results, with glare nearly totally removed in each image. The app uses your phone’s flash to provide illumination, but even so, using better available light produced the nicest results. The results look good enough for social sharing, but if it’s high resolution, high quality digital conversions you’re after, you’ll probably still need to go about it the hard way.

For more information you can watch Google’s Nat and Lo interview researchers about how it all works.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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