Frontier VS Noritsu Scanner

This post is for photographers and those interested in film photography – if you’re here just for the photos, you may want to skip this post. Recently, I’ve been learning about film photography and have been implementing shooting film alongside digital at my most recent weddings. I’m one of those kinds of learners (…people?) that becomes frustrated when I don’t know something and the ‘in between’ phase of not being great at it irritates me. So instead of asking millions of questions to successful film photographers and risking bothering them (and I HAVE bothered some of you when necessary!! thanks immensely to Kristin Sweeting mostly & Erin Wilson , too!) I just read a lot and leaned back on good ole trial & error.

One of the biggest things I’ve been indecisive about is which scanner to choose for my scanning of images. I’m sure just like me you’ve googled it and found lots of helpful side by side comparisons and learned quite a bit from them. But when it came to choosing a scanner that suited my work best, I still wasn’t sure (and to be honest I’m still not sure…but leaning towards frontier). So I contacted The FIND lab and asked them to scan one of my rolls with both the frontier & noritsu scanner for comparison. I am still learning, so I’m sure some of these cool and warm colors are exaggerated due to user error with exposing improperly. I hope some of these comparisons can help you when choosing which scanner is best for you! All questions are welcome!

All images shot on a 35mm camera – Canon 1v with Portra 800 . I shot at half the box speed at 400 ISO with a Canon 85mm 1.8 lens at f/2 and shot in AV mode for my shutter speed.

All scans provided by the FIND lab .

Images on LEFT were scanned on the FRONTIER scanner and images on the RIGHT were scanned on the NORITSU scanner.