Modding the Kodak Reels 8mm Film Digitizer (Firmware Hack)

[0dan0]

No stabilization needed, you just need a locking ring:

My Type C has the 12mm lens at 26mm, so the 8mm lens at 18mm, for a very similar resolution gain.

Compression at a high bit-rate solves most of the image quality issues (with a new lens, or a moved lens.) JPEG is also a compression format, so that will not solve all the issues either. H.264 (the .MP4s) is a just a more modern from of JPEG (very crudely.)

 

[0dan0]

Type B is finally working fully (matching C.)

The upgrade is significant.

 

[eyeidea]

@0dan0 Wow, that looks amazing! Is the Type B v6.2 image sample above with the factory lens?

 

[0dan0]

@0dan0 Wow, that looks amazing! Is the Type B v6.2 image sample above with the factory lens?

This is with the replacement 12mm lens, although it should help the stock lens a tad. As thjakob discovered, you might be able to move the stock lens closer for similar results.

 

[0dan0]

Here is Kodak Vision 3 negative (home developed) through my modified Reels scanner. Not too bad. The white balance was changed to 1,1,1.75 to remove the orange cast of the negative film.

I spent a few hours trying to find the color matrix or some way the invert in the scanner, but that might be unnecessary, as post inversion is easy.

The main issue remaining you can see from the histogram, the negative image is very low contrast. This wouldn't be so much an issue for a professional scanner outputting 10 to 16 bits, but for 8-bit scanner you want a wider histogram. The sensor readout is likely 12-bit (might be 10), so if I can find the black offset, I can get more contrast in 8-bit. Any ideas on where that might be?