F.R. Eye Is The First Ever Instant Capture Multispectral Film Scanner

In a quiet workshop on the edge of a small Saskatchewan town, two highly committed individuals bring a new kind of film scanner to life. This by no means has the familiar scent of fixer or the slow reveal of silver on paper. Instead, they’ve developed something that brings a precise hum of custom-machined rails and the click-click of LEDs cycling through spectral bands. Here, Film Rescue International™, familiar to the analog world for coaxing images from the dustiest corners of forgotten film, has unveiled something unprecedented: an instant-capture multispectral scanner for analog negatives. Nicknamed the “F.R. Eye,” this machine hopes to rewrite the rules of what film scanning can be, marrying the tactile traditions of analog photography with spectral science

We first noticed this scanner when Greg Miller, founder of Film Rescue, posted a short video on Reddit. His hands are no stranger to fixer residue and film canisters, having launched the company over 25 years ago for the purpose of processing film photographs full-time. Greg always viewed photography as a passport to the darkroom. “My true love has always been the post-production of the photographic process,” he confesses, with a tingle of nostalgia. His first foray into the chemical magic of photography came at age ten, when he discovered his father’s friend’s darkroom and was hooked on the process from then on. “In the past, I would mostly go out and take pictures so I could get into the darkroom to make the best possible prints from my negatives as I could. And now with digital, that has evolved to the best possible scans to serve the editing process. I’m quite happy just working on other people’s pictures… especially if they’re great or interesting pictures.” With decades of experience behind him, that passion looks to be evolving from making perfect prints to creating the finest possible scans using the F.R. Eye.

So how does this spectral scanner actually work? To the user, it appears almost deceptively simple: load your sheet or strip film, press a button, and out comes a scan. Under the hood, it operates with a bit more complexity. Instead of exposing the film to regular light and capturing a single RGB pass, their scanner illuminates the emulsion with multiple bands of light (including infrared). Each band lights up the film while a high-resolution Phase One IQ4 Achromatic camera snaps an image. In a short span of time, the system has six raw captures, each sensitive to a different slice of the spectrum. The results are then recombined into a single, full-color file that retains subtle spectral details invisible to standard scanners. Since each band requires its own illumination and capture, the mechanical assembly has to be impossibly rigid yet precisely adjustable. That challenge fell to Mattia Stellacci, the partner whose engineering skills turned Greg’s idea into reality.

“The main aspect in which the scanner differs from more conventional imaging/reproduction setups is in the fact that the color information is gathered sequentially, i.e., the camera takes multiple images in sequence, each being illuminated by a different spectrum of light,” Mattia explains, in vivid detail. “On the one hand, this has implications for how rigid the entire assembly needs to be, as one cannot rely on a sufficiently short capture time to ‘freeze’ residual vibration in the system. Rather, it is necessary to build the entire assembly to be as rigid as possible while still allowing minute adjustability of alignment, focus, working distance, etc. The duo went to great lengths, designing custom parts and having many custom metal parts machined to meet this mechanical objective. It must also be said that sequential captures also require a lot more software integration, as they need to be coordinated to suit key aspects of a color image, such as channel balance.

I asked them about the main challenges they faced during the construction of the F.R. Eye scanner. They were multifold, as you’d imagine for a project of this complexity. Mattia elaborates, “Most challenges we faced in building this device fall into one of three categories: 1 – The non‑compromising quality one expects when investing this many resources into an imaging platform 2 – The idiosyncrasies of the Phase One IQ4 Achromatic specifically 3 – The challenges of handling different film formats (in varying states of conservation) in a high‑throughput environment. We first figured out how we would like the film to be handled, i.e., in a variety of carriers comparable to the LPL Saunders enlarger, to be placed on a ‘table’ that the operator sits at. A guiding principle in designing the scanner was to automate as much as possible. As such, each ‘subsystem’ is controlled by a central piece of software. The device consists of a 5‑axis motion system (comparable to a CNC mill or a 3D printer) that controls bellows extension, working distance, Iris, the Lens’s float ring’ (an optical design that suppresses optical aberrations for every possible magnification in the lens’s range), and an optional motorized carrier for 35 mm film. The light source autonomously controls exposure and has the ability to blend the emission spectra of the different high-power LEDs, mix their output to create a very homogenous, diffuse light field. The camera is driven using a custom piece of software that sets the camera’s parameters, applies radiometric calibration (dark frame subtraction, linearization of the sensor response and ‘flat field calibration’) processes the images as they come in and facilitates the scanning process. It automatically sets focus, channel balance, and imaging processing parameters. Considering that a raw capture of dense (full RGB) data from this scanner is ~900 MB (per image), doing this efficiently was no easy task. The core challenge can therefore be summarized as ‘system integration’, i.e., getting all these aspects to work together reliably and without slowing the operator down.”

Just reading that took me back to my engineering days back at university, when the entire batch would stare bug-eyed at the opportunity to tinker with something this intensely mechanical. But this isn’t a uni project, and neither are the founders learning about this stuff afresh. Their motivation behind doing this was to have a scanner that is very high quality and also serviceable. Greg recounts a recent frustration: “A few months back, we were having issues with our Fuji SP‑3000 in that sensor dirt was showing up when we scanned some of our very thin lost and found film and then brought those images back up to normal values. You can’t get a new sensor anymore for this scanner, so we found what was advertised as a tested and properly functioning sensor from the UK. That was a few hundred dollars, which was fine, but getting the technician here from Toronto to small-town Saskatchewan to install it was an additional 5,000 dollars. In the end, that replacement sensor was only marginally better for low contrast film than our old sensor.” In contrast, the Phase One has a three-year warranty, and if the camera goes down, you have a replacement in 24 hours. A very expensive camera indeed, but it’s backed up by a solid warranty that’s key to their operations.

Greg and Mattia were also never completely satisfied with the results from color scanners based on Bayer-pattern digital backs. They had a couple of Bayer-pattern Phase One cameras here, and while that is considered to be the apex of a new system that you can go out and buy, they weren’t happy with the colors it was producing from color film. The new F.R. Eye fixes all the inconsistencies they observed with other scanners, and they’re finally able to satisfy customers who come to them saying, ‘Just make the scan look like the slide.’

“Considering that a raw capture of dense (full RGB) data from this scanner is ~900mb (per image) doing this efficiently was no easy task. The core challenge can therefor be summarized as “system integration” i.e. getting all these aspects to work together reliably and without slowing the operator down.”

So what prompted the carefully selected hardware components’ choices? Stellacci selected a Linos Inspec 105mm F5.6 float lens for its flat field and aberration suppression, a Novoflex Balpro bellows system for precise working distance, and the Phase One IQ4 Achromatic back for its tonal purity. The linear rails controlling magnification and focus were selected to suit the optical parameters of the lens and the IQ4’s sensor size. The “F.R. Eye” is a one-off implementation made to suit Film Rescue International‘s requirements: as such, it is unlikely to get replicated 1:1.

I assumed that, despite knowing what to expect, the first few scans would have totally blown them away. I asked the team what surprises they encountered. Greg chose a humble word to sum up his thoughts about those initial results: relief. “I was a little surprised at how well and easily the machine scans Kodachrome because that has always been difficult with whatever scanning system I have ever had used, but for the most part, not ‘surprised.’ A big part of the point of this scanner was to have great and easy color, and we got that,” he says. “Film Rescue is a tiny and often struggling company – 8 people, all of whom continue to do this largely out of a labor of love. With the amount of money we’ve put into this, if this had failed, it would have been devastating for us. So, ‘surprise’ is mostly the wrong word. I think ‘relief’ is a much better word.”

A large part of Greg’s relief comes from the end result of trusting a stranger on Reddit to partner with – Mattia. He was not someone that Greg knew personally when he shipped off the USD 50,000 camera to him in Berlin to put together for Film Rescue. “Had Mattia not been the guy we needed, had he been an unscrupulous actor that wasn’t really qualified to put this together for us, or even worse, just a guy that took our camera and disappeared, that would have been a complete devastating mess we would likely not have survived. So yeah…this is “relief” and not “surprise”. Maybe further proof we live in a simulation (sort of kidding) because there’s so many ways this could have gone sideways and didn’t. It really did play out pretty perfectly. As it turned out, Mattia couldn’t have been a more qualified, harder-working, and honorable person than he is.” Greg confesses.

Film Rescue has built a reputation around salvaging lost or forgotten images from obsolete and expired formats – a mission that seems deeply tied to memory, chemistry, and time. I asked Greg what originally brought him into this world of photographic preservation, and how that philosophy connects to experimental builds like this multispectral analog camera. Greg says it all started with him wanting to give customers the absolute best possible scans they could find for their negatives. “In 1983, I was running a movie film lab in Toronto in my late teens, and the current chemistry for processing movie film was able to process old photographic film. By the late 90s, I wanted to get out of the stress of processing movie film and having to do dailies. My partner and I decided we would sort of semi-retire and run a small business… just the two of us, processing old film. Now Film Rescue is 8 full-time people, bigger than my company in Toronto ever was… so I guess that didn’t quite work out,” he says with a grin.

“We do everything possible to get the most out of lost and found film, and this build is part of that. We don’t want to be in a position where we send someone’s film back to them and they’re able to, or find someone who is able to, pull a better scan and edit from the film than we can. There is something to be able to honestly say ‘This is as good as you can get’ in terms of lost and found film developing. These lost and found films can be extremely precious to people – often being the last new glimpse a person will have of something or someone that was loved, and now is lost to time. We take that seriously.”

From that unassuming lab in Toronto to this custom‑built scanner, Greg’s journey has never strayed from reverence for the emulsion. The F.R. Eye doesn’t merely digitize film; it illuminates it, one wavelength at a time, restoring analog memories in their richest form. The future seems bright for film scanning, and it looks like a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, will be leading the way.

All images seen in this article were provided for usage by the folks at Film Rescue International