This review of sorts has been in the making for a long time. When I got to Washington University St. Louis the first thing I did was join the photography club. There I learned that the department had a pretty special scanner in their lab. At first I was told they had a drum scanner, sadly this was not the case but they did have the king of the CCD type dry scanners, the Flextight X1. This is a $15,000 CCD scanner made by Hasselblad, the world renown camera manufacturer from Germany. All I can say is that I’ve been itching to run some slide film though this scanner for a while now and I finally got to make some archival scans.
This year I was finally able to play with this wonderful machine and I can say it certainly doesn’t disappoint. Before I had access to the X1 I did all of my 35mm film scanning on an Epson V550 with the proprietary software. The results from the flatbed scanner never made me really happy although I never really knew anything else. The V550 does a fine job for 120 sized film but for 35mm it lacks the ability to pull the quality locked into the positive image. So I will attempt to compare the two scanners and share what my thoughts are.
First lets start with some specs of the scanner to try and understand why the X1 is so much more expensive and try to justify why someone may want this crazy machine. The Felxtight X1 scanner is a CCD dry scanner with a maximum optical resolution of 6300dpi, Dmax 4.6, and auto focus for the flex type film carrier. The Epson v550 is a flat bed scanner with a maximum resolution of 4800dpi (true resolution is probably closer to 1500dpi) and Dmax of 3.4. The final difference is the software used to convert the files. Hasselblad has its own software and file type to keep as much information as possible in the file from the scan, these files are large too with a 35mm scan being about 450 mb! While I mostly scanned positive film I will include a color negative example to compare how the two scanners convert negatives. The purpose of this comparison is to show the final product. I’m not going to simply make them the same because the files these scanners produce are very different. With that out of the way let’s look at some pictures, hover over the photo to know which scanner is which.
V550 (Nikon FM, Provia 100f, Delhi ID 2019)
The first image was taken in India on my Nikon FM, I believe that it was shot at F2.8 on Fujifilm Provia 100f. The Flextight scan was done at 6300dpi and the v550 was made at 3200dpi and I would say the difference is astonishing. Not only is the Flextight scan close to 50 megapixels, but I honestly believe it’s picking up 50 megapixels of resolution from the film. The V550 on the other hand looks mushy with little detail in the cropped image even though the resolution should be somewhat comparable. Another big difference is the dynamic range, if you look at the gentleman’s jacket or the highlights on the jeans you can see just how much more detail can be pulled out using the X1 compared to the V550.
The next image to be compared is a medium format frame from the Mamiya C3 with a the Sekor 80mm F2.8. It was shot on Kodak Ektar 100 in the Sawtooth National Forest forest two years ago now. It’s one the sharpest frames I have on 120 so it should serve as a good comparison. It’s important to note that the Flegtight’s maximum resolution for 120 film is 3200 dpi which means both negatives were technically scanned at the same resolution. So this is probably the best apples to apples comparison of the two scanners.
I’d say all the same things apply here as they do for the 35mm example, higher dynamic range and more sharpness. The other important improvement over the V550 is the color accuracy. This comes as no surprise to me because the Epson software has always bugged me when it comes to color. I was always disappointed in this photo because I could never get the rust to truly look like rust, or get the sky blue while still holding a warm tone. The amount of information locked away in the X1 file is truly impressive. When editing the X1 file the amount of latitude I had rivals even the Fuji x100s sensor which is an impressive feat on its own.
So what’s the verdict? Am I going to shell out $15,000 on this scanner? Well let’s just say if I had $15,000 I would be half tempted. This scanner is absolutely impressive and it makes me want to shoot Provia the rest of my life. The way it renders the grain in an image is really magical and the color and ease of producing an image is also something to lust over. But, $15,000 is a lot of money and there are a lot of other options out there that can do a good job too. To be honest I was surprised at how well the V550 did compared to the Flextight X1 it’s undeniably better but the results of the flatbed are still pretty darn good (at least for 120 film). Also, there’s the Nikon Coolscan scanners that have a very similar image quality for just about $4,000, though these machines are starting to get hard to find. Anyways I will be very sad when I don’t get to use this scanner anymore and I have hopes to take advantage of this scanner for as long as I have access. If you have any questions about how I scan my pictures or about these scanners just comment or send me an email.
Update: 8/16/22
My last year at WUSTL I did one final comparison with specifically slide film and the X1 scanner. If you’d like to check out the comparisons please hit this link!