Drum wet mounting easier and faster than thought

[alexcong]

I just want to share my experience of wet mount film on drum of my recently purchased Howtek scanner. I used to use an Epson V700 and Betterscanning mounting station. I dry mount film on the AR glass to keep it flat. The betterscanning did a great job, but the process isn't a fast one. I need to mount film one frame at a time. When scan 120, is takes quite some time to scan a roll.

As I start to use the drum scanner, I expected it to be even slower. Not really! It is actually faster. I can mount 6 frames of 6x7 at a time and scan them all without intervention. Total time require from me is only around 15 min for mounting, cleaning, and operating the scanner software. It takes much longer than that for the scanner to scan of course, but it's my time that counts. Oh, and much less time for dusting and spotting afterward.

Wet mounting shouldn't be a reason to turn people away from drum scanner.

[Noah A]

I agree. I wasted so much time screwing around with glass mounts for 120 film on my old nikon ls9000 that it was getting crazy. And I often needed to re-scan due to lack of film flatness.

The drum scanner is a huge time saver. And it allowed me to move up to 4x5!

[jtphoto532]

Are you using gel or oil for the wet mount?