Getting emails from the folks at Negative Supply is always exciting. Especially when it’s an announcement of a new product from its labs. Their teams have been working hard to bring out the new Light Source Mini-97 CRI. It’s a whopping four times brighter than their 4×5 Light Source Basic, which we’ve reviewed in the past. Judging by their strict quality standards, this new item looks to make your analog scans easier.
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The New Light Source Mini-97 CRI
Negative Supply tries to keep things easy for existing customers and attractive for new ones. Their new Light Source Mini-97 CRI is intended to fit right in with any existing Negative Supply kit you have. It’s named so because of the 97 CRI bulbs used for even illumination. Building on the runaway success of the 4×5 Light Source Basic model, the new Light Source Mini-97 CRI isn’t just more compact. It’s also a lot brighter – around 4 stops brighter, in fact. Use it with their various film carrier models to scan all formats up to 6×9 120 films.
What Makes This Convenient
Digital photography has definitely taken center stage over the last decade and a half. At the same time, a growing number of us are embracing analog photography and its charms. For some of us, it’s a hark to our childhood memories. For others, it’s a great way of slowing down their photography thought process and absorbing the moment more. There’s the tactile experience of loading a roll of film and the slow but addictive thrill of composing a frame with a vintage camera. Let’s not forget the eager anticipation of waiting for the results. And the aesthetic quality of the various film stocks is another reason why analog photography will live on for much longer. Years after the death knell was sounded for it in the recent past.
But there’s also the flip side to practicing analog photography. Rising film stock costs are starting to pinch our pockets. In many countries, getting your desired film stock involves importing it from abroad. You’ll often have to send it abroad to get it developed in safe and trustworthy labs. This leads many film photographers, including myself, to embrace the convenience and creative control of home scanning. It’s certainly not something that you can be skilled in overnight. However, scanning film negatives in the comfort of my home is something I’m doing a lot more of these days.
Negative Scanning At Home Needn’t Be Complicated
As digital cameras became household objects in the last decade, many film labs struggled to keep up with the decrease in demand for film development. Film photographers like myself then struggled to find good labs in town that we could build a relationship. Factor in the price of shipping your negatives to and fro, and the costs begin to add up quickly for those who enjoy practicing analog photography more than once a month. Not to mention that there could be various delays and uncertainties when entrusting your precious memories to external parties. Without getting into too many details, some photos I take aren’t meant for anyone else’s eyes.
Once you get the hang of how to develop your film at home, scanning those negatives doesn’t need to be complicated at all.
Old Negatives Need Digitization
The number of slides and negatives that my grandfather left behind is innumerable. I’ve honestly lost count. Every other month we stumble upon a stash of negatives. The photos he’s made from those are in some album or another that granny has safely kept in her cupboards. While the prints aren’t tattered by any standard, they’ve definitely faded. That’s over 30 years of film negatives now whose photos don’t look like they once did. This then gave me and my eldest aunt the idea to, over many months, start to digitize those negatives. As a way of preserving them for longer and to reprint some of those fantastic memories that granddad took.
For years we looked at getting flatbed scanners to get these negatives on a computer. As expensive as those scanners are, I never really enjoyed the results they gave me. Most of them weren’t more than 8 or 12 megapixels in resolution and came with software that wasn’t exactly ideal for working with. It’s time-consuming enough to restore the negatives before scanning them, but when the scanning process too became cumbersome, we gave up for a while. Utilizing kits like the Negative Supply Basic Carrier 35 makes the latter approach a much quicker and more enjoyable one.
Is The Light Source Mini For You?
I remember wishing the 4×5 Light Source Basic was at least a couple of stops brighter while testing this out a few years ago. Ideally, I would have liked a dimmable light source behind my slides (Negative Supply, I hope you’re reading this). But I welcome the size reduction that the new Light Source Mini brings. It’s perfect for anyone who only needs to scan 35mm and 120 film. It’s an ideal addition to getting your analogs back to life. Use it with any smartphone negative conversion app you have. For best results, invest in the Negative Supply Basic Kit.
You can pre-order the Light Source Mini-97 CRI from this link.