Equipment Needed

Flatbed scanner with transparency unit

The scanner must have wide enough transparency unit as this determines the length of film strip that can be scanned at once. The scanner must also be supported by the Sane scanner library.

I personally use an Epson 4990, which is an reasonably prices scanner with excellent image quality. This is probably the only scanner that currently works out-of-the box.

Lego NXT

Lego NXT is a programmable robotics building set from Lego. It is used to build the mechanism for moving the film. You can buy it from good toy shops or directly from Lego.

My software does not work with the standard Lego firmware, but is based on leJOS instead. But you can easily reinstall the normal firmware after you have scanned your films.

Film holder

The film holder keeps the film flat and at the right position in scanner. This you must build yourself as the scanner manufacturers do not provide suitable ones for 2mm film (and Lego bricks are too coarse for building one...)

There are several designs available in net, My own design is described in my blog.

PC with Lots of Disk

Currently the software has been used & tested only in Linux environment, although I assume that porting it to Mac/Windows would be relatively easy task. It requires the following libraries

  • Sun Java version 5 or 6 - these are available in most Linux distributions
  • Sane libraries for accessing the scanner - the same that are used with other Linux scanning applications as well.

During scanning the raw data is stored on disk and it requires a lot of storage space (about 10 GB per minute). The final movie file is of course much smaller, you can remove the raw data after you are satisfied with you results.