A Round of Film

A few years back my family and I went out to Ontario to clean out my grandma’s house. What we thought would be a one week trip turned into three trips, because 90 years and three kids ends you up with a pretty full basement. Every box we pulled out resulted in multiple of us gathered around reminiscing, telling stories about some camping trip, or finding something stashed away in a high school hiding spot from fifty years ago that never got found by parents.

What turned out to be my favourite thing to uncover was the undeveloped rolls of film or never printed negatives. I took a bunch of them home with me and while I unfortunately didn’t find any gold on the undeveloped rolls, some of the different formats of film were quite interesting, most notably the disc film.

The main formats of film available today are 35mm and 120, with some very limited 110 and 127 still produced. Over the last century though there have been many different formats that have come and gone. APS and disc film are the two shortest lived formats, being produced for 15 and 16 years each. I found three developed disc film discs in the basement and became quite interested in this unique form of photography.

While some of the premise of disc film has merit, it does have a number of downfalls, hence why it was only produced for 16 years (1982-1998). It comes in a fully enclosed cartridge which makes it very hard to slip up and accidentally expose all of your negatives to light. Since the photos fan out around a disc instead of rolling up, the cartridge is very low profile making it, and the camera it goes in, extremely small and portable. The biggest downside to that compact size is how small the negatives are. The developed discs look cute, but being so small the photos lack detail and have a fair amount of grain.

Scanning them proved to be a bit of a feat. For 35mm and 120 negatives I usually flatbed scan, either here at Beau using the Epson V850 or at home using my Epson V600. I first scanned the discs my usual way, on the V850. The images looked very soft which at first I thought was just because of their small size, but I suspect is because the plastic holder in the centre of the negatives doesn’t allow them to lay flat on the scanner.

I was hoping I could get a bit more detail out of the images so I tried DSLR scanning them. For the first round I used a Canon R5 with a 100mm macro lens set up on a tripod with the negatives on a light table. I set the lens up as close to the disc as it would focus, which was around 2-3 inches. That is very close and for 35mm negatives it would work great, but for this size I still had to do a good amount of cropping. Once I converted and cropped the images, there was a significant amount of grain. I still wasn’t quite sure if that was just the nature of the film, or was added digital grain from the amount of cropping.

I tried again with a different DSLR scanning set up to see if that made a difference in the grain. The second time was with an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and a 60mm macro lens. There was a good amount less cropping needed for the final images, and the photos looks significantly more clear.

I am very glad I tried again (and again) to get a clear result. I ended up being quite happy with the images from the Olympus, and was actually impressed by the quality from such a small negative. When I first grabbed the discs I was expecting the images to be horrible quality. Especially for starting with that expectation I think there is a good amount of detail and sharpness. After looking through the scans I was able to determine that the photos are from 1983, so my grandpa was pretty on top of trying out this new tech, and I’m glad he did.

I doubt it is a format I will ever shoot with, mainly because of the hassle of getting my hands on disc film that would be at least 27 years expired. But if you happen to have some still lying around or are interested in finding some online, we do have a Kodak Disc 6000 camera here on consignment for $20
https://www.beauphoto.com/product/used-kodak-disc-6000-in-case/