Mamiya 645 Super, 80mm f1.9 C, Kodak Portra 160VC
Well, it’s the new year. Last year was a decent year for me photographically and I’ll have a couple of wrap-up posts coming soon. but first a few musings. I picked up a Konica Minolta Scan Dual IV to replace my failing SDIII scanner. On paper it’s a minor upgrade, going from 2820dpi to 3200dpi with no other significant changes. In practice it’s a bigger upgrade as scan speed is improved and the SDIV comes with a new negative holder, the FH-02, that is massively superior to the flimsy and fussy FH-01 that the SDIII came with. It’s now a hinged clamshell design which works simply and does not have the flex points or flimsy latches of the older design. If you have an SDIII, hit eBay and buy the new holder (the SDIV and SDIII use the same holder spec, so the new FH-02 will work on the SDIII). And it’s quite nice to have a scanner that doesn’t lock up or crash the software continuously like my SDIII did (likely due to damage from a broken FH-01 jamming it). I finished up my B&W 35mm archive scanning project just in time for years end. Only took me 2 years to get through. I’m currently working on getting my 35mm slides in order, have about 5 more rolls to scan to get everything archived, then I’ll probably rescan the older stuff to get standardized names and better quality scans. And then it’s time to get the 35mm Colour stuff in order, which is a much larger order. I’ll need to pick up another 100 pack of sleeves and a 3 ring binder and rescan somewhere from 100 to 140 rolls of film. Big project, but when I’m done my film archives will finally make sense. Also need to add more HDD space, my backup drive for scans is almost full (520GB out of 595GB actual capacity), so another 2TB external is probably a good investment.
