A second hand DSLR setup is going to be roughly the same price or less. I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers. If you want fancy and experimental, filmomat has arguably a more interesting but pricier offering.
But naysaying aside, I hope they manage to find a niche that allows them to survive as a company, and keep the analog photography revival alive.
And if you get one with Pixel Shift, you can get way higher resolutions than the 22MP they're offering (e.g. my cheapo Olympus gets 40MP JPEG or 64MP RAW from a 16MP sensor.)
Am I missing something or is this supposed to be in another tier of image quality?
> I'm also not sure what kind of workflow improvements it actually offers.
The obvious one is auto-feeding and portability, but without using it who knows. It doesn't offer IR, but even Filmomat's system needs a modified camera. You get that with most flatbed and Plustek-style scanners. I have a V850 Pro which wasn't cheap either, but it'll do a full roll in one go and I can walk away. Even if I shot a roll a day it would be more than fast enough. It has occasional focus issues, and you need to be scrupulous about dusting, but it works well enough. I've never been a huge fan of the setup required for copy-stand scanning and it's tricky getting the negatives perfectly flat in/frame. The good carriers are also not cheap, look at Negative Supply for example.
Frankly it also looks great, like the Filmomat. I think some of the appeal is a chunk of modern looking hardware and also the hope that it's maintained? My Epson works well, but I ended up paying for VueScan because the OEM software is temperamental.
> “Is Knokke open, repairable, and long-term supported?”
> “Absolutely. We're committed to building a scanner that lasts decades. All schematics and repair manuals will be publicly available, replacement parts can be purchased directly, and the software will remain supported for as long as possible.”
Is the software open source?
Yes. Our control application, Korova, will be fully open source and maintained long term. It’s a native, lightweight application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
With that said, I'm happy to see new film products released in 2025/2026. Hopefully this is just the first at-bat.
(I have submitted it earlier but no traction)
Is there such a thing as a cheap drum scanner.
I'm both amazed and really pleased to see anyone attempting to launch a totally new scanner in 2025, and genuinely hoping the actual scans are really made at the resolution and color-depth claimed in the text: too many recent scanners are simply upscaled, lower bit-depth devices marketed with exaggerated specs.
I also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000, so I'm not immediately in the market for this. But I don't expect the Coolscan to last forever, and the Firewire connections on the machine are already abandoned by Apple, who chose not to support the cables in their latest Operating System - so eventually I won't be able to connect it to a new computer.
For example I wanted to look at the first picture in the horizontal gallery that scrolls horizontally when you scroll vertically. However, there is no way for me to view the whole image. Either it is cutoff at the bottom, or it starts horizontally scrolling. Switching from vertical to horizontal scrolling is awkward and I just want to skip the gallery.
scrolling on that page feels slow, sluggish, and if you switch to spacebar, you actually miss significant content since it only loads/becomes visible halfway into the page.
Like others have said, dust is a huge issue. Some film labs cut film into short strips. some film is just a single image (for example if previously cut to fit into slides).
The film is designed to form into a coil. So, if there's grit or any hard material you'll end up with scratches on the negative itself.
--is it only 35mm as well? I don't think I see any mention of formats it supports. So I can only assume it's just 35mm.-- EDIT: found the 120mm section in the FAQ.
If I wanted to wait 1/2 second for each part of the page to load I’d have stayed on dialup.
Did they not research the competition?
I can buy a brand-new 7200 (virtual) DPI machine with infrared, proper color metering, wide software support, and multi-exposure system for $400, less than half the price of this offering.
It also supports slides and single frames, whereas this has a min. of 3 in a strip.
It's expensive compared to digital for snapshots, but if you enjoy working in the darkroom as a hobby, you can probably get everything you need for free or cheap.
35mm film and 120 film are a similar cost per roll, but with 35mm you get 36 exposures vs 8-16 exposures on 120 film (6x12 and 6x4, with square 6x6 in the middle at 12 exposures). And if you shoot half-frame, the cost/shot really goes in the 35mm direction.
That said, I have a handful of of 35mm cameras (all fixed lens vintage rangefinder) and a post-war Zeiss Super Ikonta IV (6x6 120 format). The Olympus 35DC is my favorite of the bunch - it's automatic except focus - really sharp and fast lens - just a pleasure to use. And a Polaroid Go 2 because it's just dumb fun (way overpriced for the quality, and sensible people buy Instax cameras instead, but the Polaroid form-factor was just too much for me to pass up).
I shoot film because it makes me slow down and think a bit. With my mirrorless cameras, I'm too prone to spray and pray and sorting through hundreds of shots can kill the fun for me. That, and the film look is nostalgic for me - sometimes I just want rough snapshots - feels more like a memory vs the crystal clear high res digital output.
I'm sure this will be on every photography youtuber's channel shortly, can't wait to see it in action.
IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.
Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.
But it was painfully slow.
This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.
Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.
This sounds excellent to me, personally.
Epson stopped making their flatbeds that do film, reportedly because they can’t get the CCDs anymore. That may be a rumor.
The result is they go for 2x MSRP on eBay for models that are many years old. Because that’s all that exists.
Without that, you can buy the kind of scanner meant for a photo lab ($$$$$), DIY it with a DSLR ($$$ if you don’t have one), or pay your a lab a lot per roll and hope they do a good job.
I’m not saying it’s a giant market but it certainly seems to me like there’s enough of one that it could support a small product.
You can get brand new Plustek OpticFilm scanners for 35mm and smaller starting around $300, and there are plenty of other options above that. Plus the DIY.
I’m sure 35mm is easier to make and certainly a bigger market but it’s also a lot more crowded.
I expect their specs are far better than the $300 one I’ve mentioned, I don’t know enough to know. But medium format people are desperate for anything.
I would love a new scanner for 21st century but there just no way anyone serious is trading CCD (or PMT if you got the cash) for CMOS.
But I applaud the initiative and will definitely buy it to try but not to keep.
I tried various fancy holders, but in the end decided that I'll likely have to make my own holder from aluminum or steel sheet metal. And even then you run into the problem of lengthwise curvature. For those that are unaware of the problem with this, these scanners have a very limited depth of field, in the range of 1mm or less. So if your film is bent, some of it will always be out of focus.
I can't see much on this fancy webpage, because they made it so fancy that some of the images do not load and those that do load are oh so mysteriously dark. But if their scanner can scan both heavily curved rolls and strips, I will be buying it.
As to optical quality, if you can get your film to stay flat, this is a solved problem, that Epson mentioned above can produce fantastic results (more pixels that you want, generally).
https://web.archive.org/web/20251111210606/https://www.soke....
PS to add more - I am unable to scroll, all I see is the picture with the dark background. If I use arrow keys instead of the touchpad, I can scroll a bit then after a second or so the page snaps back to the top. I have Firefox on MacOS.
(I know the HN rules say that we should focus on the contents rather than criticising the technical aspects of a website, but in this case the contents are not accessible).
for just contact sheet fast … you can just move and push the blue tooth button … for one particular treasure slow … you can do pixel shift and focus stacking …
Marshferm•1h ago
cs02rm0•1h ago