I recently put together a camera scanning rig and wanted to compare the lenses I had about the collection. Here we have 4 different enlarger lenses, a dedicated macro lens and a Minolta 58mm PF at the end.
And the full images:
And here’s the original flatbed:
I also did a slide and a colour neg:
Conclusions? They’re all pretty good and all better than flatbed (Epson V850) but the real benefit is the speed of processing. If you wanna go the camera scanning route I think an enlarger lens is going to be better than a regular macro every time as they’re better corrected for flat field work. I’ll be using the Rodagon for extra working distance. It and the Nikkor I think were the sharpest overall.
While I was here I thought what if I used the worst lens for the job? The following are off a Minolta 58mm PF. This is an old SR mount lens, before they had meter coupling.
Clearly softer than the other choices, but not unusuable. What about the whole image?
We got issues, the edges are soft cause it’s not a flat field lens, and we have vigetting too. This could be combatted a bit by stopping down more. How about colour?
Nice and sharp at the centre again, but the whole image?
Massive obvious problems with fringing, colour shifts and edge softness, it also captured way less shadow detail in the bottom right there. The photo is meant to look like this:
Moral of the story is don’t use a regular lens for your scanning. Use a macro or an adapted enlarger lens and you’ll be fine. Better to save the 58 for what it’s good at:
