Holder for scanning 5x7

[Ben Calwell]

I, too, just lay the 5x7 neg directly on the glass and have not had any problems (knock on wood).

[jim10219]

My sheet film negatives are flat after processing, but sometimes they curl slightly while sitting on the glass in my V700, presumably from the heat of the lamp or the scanner's electronics warming up. It's enough to cause trouble in the corners of the scan, so a top AN glass or at least some way of holding the corners down is helpful.

I had an issue with that as well. I used tiny pieces of blue painters tape to hold down the corners on the glass. I positioned it so it was just barely kissing the edges of the negative. And I used the special blue painters tape with low residue and cleaned the glass after every scan. It would have worked, but it’s always humid as hell here, so Newton rings were unavoidable, even with the emulsion side down. Hence why I settled on a wet scan. And honestly, it’s a lot easier and cheaper than I originally thought it would be.

Another idea would be to place the negative in a negative holder for an enlarger. I haven’t tried it for scanning, and height may be an issue (as well as scratching the glass), but it’s what I use for DSLR scanning negatives against a light box and it works really well. Again, I tried just about everything else before coming up with the simplest, cheapest, and most obvious solution.

[SMBooth]

In theory your using the 8x10 area so you just need to lay straight on glass and use the Epson plastic edge mask/guide. The cut out is needed to allow the machine to set colour balance.