This article grew out of techniques I found mostly by trial and error while scanning my collection of 110-format (Pocket Instamatic) Kodachrome slides. Some of those pictures are in the Europe Through the Front Door section of this Web site. While my experience with scanning 110 film is mainly with slides, I do discuss the available options for scanning negatives, along with a few notes about the older 126 (Kodapak or Instamatic) format. The information about scanning Kodachrome applies equally to 35mm slides.

110 film requires at least a 4000dpi scanner. While the theoretical full frame size of 110 film is 13x17mm, the opening of a Kodak slide mount is 12x16mm. The largest scan my old 2400dpi Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart scanner could produce from a 110 slide is 1133x1511, equivalent to around 1.7 megapixels. A finished real-life scan will be smaller than that after necessary cropping. I found I could make somewhat acceptable 13x18cm prints from those scans, but nothing larger.

You’ll need a dedicated film scanner, which is unfortunately becoming an endangered species. A cheap flatbed scanner with a film adapter will yield disappointing results. It not only lacks the necessary resolution, but the tiny slides and negatives will reveal all the optical compromises inherent in scanning film with a device designed for paper “reflection copy.”

My 4000dpi Canon FS4000US scanner can produce a full-frame scan of 1890x2520; that’s equivalent to 4.8 megapixels. After cropping, a typical 8-bit TIFF file is somewhere between 12 and 13 megabytes. With a sharp slide that was digitally processed and sharpened properly, you probably would never know that a 20x25cm print came from “110.” Pacific Image and Plustek Technology have new film scanners that claim 7200dpi resolution. I haven’t investigated either of them to determine whether this resolution is real or mere marketeering. With 35mm film, such a high resolution is likely to produce unwieldy files without significantly more useful detail than a 4000dpi scan. But with tiny 110 film (or the even tinier Minox format), the higher resolution— assuming it’s real— should translate into visible image quality.

If your 110 slides are in 30x30mm plastic mounts, you’ll need to locate at least one 50x50mm adapter to fit the little slides into a scanner’s slide holder. The Swiss company GEPE lists a “50 x 50 Adapter 110” (Article No. 7500) in its catalog of special format slide mounts. In the United States, B&H sells them as a special order item (in case their Web page changes, the B&H catalog number is GEA110). They’re also available from a number of retailers in Europe.

I have no experience with the GEPE adapters because I have been using the original Kodak “2x2 adapters for 110 slides.” A few years ago I found a box of them in a local camera store that had several shelves full of antiquated white elephant items. You might be able to find them on the Web, at auction sites or at vendors that specialize in hard-to-find items. Or you might find them in the back room of a camera store that has been around a while. While these adapters clearly were not meant to be reusable, with a bit of careful handling it’s possible to repeatedly snap slides in and out of them for scanning.

I recommend VueScan scanning software. Among its many advantages are a number of features that make scanning Kodachrome slides (in any format) easier. It allows multi-pass scanning on many scanners (such as the Canon FS4000US) whose native software doesn’t support it. Its infrared cleaning is more likely to work with Kodachrome, and it can save cleaned and non-cleaned versions of the same scan without the need to re-scan the slide.

Scanning the even older 126 film poses no physical difficulties. The film is 35 millimeters wide, and slides are in standard 50x50mm mounts. Negative strips as well as slides should fit in standard film holders, although the top of the square 28x28mm frame will probably be cropped. But it might not be easy to get a good image from a scan. Color negatives older than the mid-1970s (Kodacolor-X) had a different color balance and a much denser orange mask than today’s films (Kodacolor II and its descendants). Their color dyes were also prone to deterioration and fading. That may add up to lots of color correction work.

Ektachrome, Agfachrome, or GAF/Anscochrome slides will be at least 30 years old; they’ll almost certainly suffer from some degree of fading. But unless they’ve been projected a lot or subjected to high humidity, Kodachrome slides weather the decades quite well and should pose only the normal challenges of scanning Kodachrome.

The biggest challenge you’re likely to face with 126 film is the lack of sharpness. Although there were a few notable exceptions, most Instamatic-type cameras had fixed-focus, single-element plastic lenses. They also had slow fixed shutter speeds, typically 1/90 second in daylight or 1/40 second with flash. The cameras could produce adequate small prints, if you didn’t look too closely. But the softness— often a complex mixture of lens blur, chromatic aberration, and camera shake— becomes very apparent as soon as you view that first scanned file on your monitor. Deconvolution sharpening and motion blur reduction (using the Smart Sharpen tool in Photoshop CS2 or CS3, or the Focus Magic plug-in) can extract some detail, but it can’t make a soft image from a cheap lens look truly sharp.

About Slides

110 slides start out with two problems that make scanning difficult. The first is the obvious one: the small size of the film that limits the resolution of scans. The second has to do with Kodachrome (which substantially outsold Ektachrome in the 110 format). The unique dyes that give Kodachrome its distinctive palette and archival dark storage stability severely challenge desktop scanners.

Kodachrome is notorious for its narrow exposure latitude. Slides are contrasty and dense even when properly exposed. Shadows tend to “block up” and turn to featureless black on scans; compensatory curve adjustments will often reveal more sensor noise than detail. Even slight underexposure may mean a very dense slide that requires heroic noise reduction measures. Underexposure was a common occurrence with averaging meters like the Pocket Instamatics had, particularly in overcast light when the bright white sky often tricked the meter. Professional photographers sometimes intentionally underexposed Kodachrome to increase apparent saturation in the days before Fuji Velvia redefined saturated color. Overexposure produces weak and washed-out color, although that is somewhat easier to correct than underexposure.

Even with a correctly exposed slide, the unique Kodachrome dyes often produce scans with pronounced green or cyan color casts. Getting a sparkling image with a neutral balance may require some extreme adjustments in your image editor.

Another undesirable characteristic of Kodachrome dyes is that they don’t transmit infrared light consistently. That confuses infrared cleaning software, too often rendering it useless. The manuals for scanners that use Applied Science Fiction’s Digital ICE and Canon’s FARE specifically warn that infrared cleaning doesn’t work with Kodachrome. That warning is definitely true with Canon’s FARE.

Ed Hamrick claims that the cleaning algorithm he devised for VueScan works with Kodachrome. I have found that it works capriciously at best, and the effectiveness of cleaning in general seems to vary significantly between VueScan versions— if you find one that works well with your scanner, hang on to it! Some slides clean beautifully, with any artifacts visible only under high magnification. Other slides utterly confuse it. I’ve seen scans that have the full range of artifacts, blurred edges, and smeared details; but the dust, dirt, and scratches are crisp and untouched! It’s sort of a gamble whether VueScan will clean a given slide, since the effectiveness of infrared cleaning seems to vary with different batches of Kodachrome. My informal, unscientific observation is that it’s more likely to work with an old Kodachrome-X slide than with one on the newer Kodachrome 64.

If you scan Ektachrome slides you won’t have those problems. But you won’t be home free either. At the time Ektachrome was available in 110, its dyes were much less stable than Kodachrome’s. So any Ektachrome slides are likely to have visible fading or staining.

About Negatives

Scanning 110 negatives is a much more difficult challenge than scanning slides because the 35mm strip film holders included with most scanners can’t reliably accommodate 16mm film. I have experimented with placing a strip of four 110 negatives in a Canon FS4000US film holder. With careful placement of the film strip along the bottom of the holder’s opening for 35mm frame 1, the left edge of the holder and the plastic rib between frames 3 and 4 will keep the strip in place after carefully closing the holder.

Having tried a few scans that way, I found it rather difficult to keep the strip from moving out of alignment when closing the negative holder. I’m also not sure this arrangement holds the negatives flat enough to assure sharp focus. It might be worth trying, but I disclaim all responsibility if your film slips and gets jammed or stuck inside the scanner. Martin Tai has a solution to this problem that he described in a photo.net forum post. Scroll down to the end of the page to see a diagram of a paper mask he made for scanning Minox negatives using the negative holder of a Canon FS4000US. Minox film is 9.5mm wide, with an 8x11mm frame; you should be able to increase the size of the opening to accommodate the 16mm width and 13x17mm frame of 110 film.

The $1,850 Nikon Coolscan 9000 is the only current scanner I’m aware of for which a 16mm film holder is available. That special-order accessory (FH-816) costs $320 (both prices as of March 2008). But the e-mails I have received from readers who have tried this film holder suggest that it’s not a simple solution. The FH-816 appears intended for 16mm motion picture film or microfilm. Both VueScan and the Nikon software seem to have problems accommodating the 110 frame, which is larger than a motion picture frame and oriented horizontally rather than vertically.

Judging from the large number of visitors to this page— most of whom get here through search engine queries about “scanning 110 negatives”— the demand for a practical way to scan 110-format film clearly is much greater than scanner manufacturers seem to realize. 110 was a very popular and successful format in the 1970s and 1980s. So there surely are many potential customers who have shoeboxes filled with precious memories on numerous little negatives. I suggest contacting the executives of Nikon— the sole remaining major manufacturer of film scanners— as well as those of Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard (who make flatbed scanners that can handle film). Although the new 7200dpi film scanners from Pacific Image and Plustek Technology would seem ideal choices for 110, they don’t offer compatible film holders. You might want to contact them as well. If enough people bring this hidden demand to the attention of scanner manufacturers, they may finally realize it’s a lucrative opportunity they’ve overlooked.

In the meantime, the only other option I know of is to put individual negative frames into slide mounts. In the 1970s, 50x50mm cardboard mounts were available for 110 slides. I haven’t been able to find anyone who still sells these, but they could possibly turn up on a Web auction site or as a “white elephant” in camera stores. GEPE lists glass “13 x 17 Pocket-Instamatic Anti-Newton” mounts (Article No. 6502) in their special format slide mounts catalog. In the United States, B&H sells them as a special-order item (their catalog number is GESM6502 in case the Web page changes). While these mounts aren’t horribly expensive, they probably won’t be practical if you’ve got a large number of negatives to scan. The glass in the mounts will confuse a scanner’s automatic focus and interfere with infrared cleaning; so you’ll have to carefully pry off the glass from both sides of each mount with a small screwdriver before inserting the film. If your scanner’s native software doesn’t support color negatives in slide mounts, VueScan does.

Regardless of how you get 110 negatives through your scanner, be prepared to do some extensive color restoration. In addition to its other failings, the early Kodacolor II negative film wasn’t very stable and has probably faded significantly. The 30-year-old negatives I experimented with benefited from VueScan’s “Restore Fading” option, but the scans were still very grainy and disappointing.

If you have prints in reasonable shape, scanning them with a flatbed scanner (and making whatever corrections are necessary to compensate for fading) might be the easiest way to preserve 110-format memories for the digital age.

These scanning tips assume the use of VueScan. Your scanner’s native software may or may not have the same capability. You’ll need to choose Advanced options.

1. To get the most out of a Kodachrome slide, set the black and white points to zero. The result will be a rather flat scan, but it will retain all the shadow and highlight detail your scanner is capable of capturing. You can choose appropriate black and white points later when you’re processing the image. Kodachrome scans always seem to look darker than other films, so you’ll probably have to increase the brightness or gamma, often substantially.
    
2. Use VueScan’s IMAGE setting rather than the Color Slide Film/Kodachrome setting. That is what Hamrick recommends. But you might also try the Kodachrome setting for lower contrast. One of the advantages of VueScan is that once you’ve made a scan you can change settings and parameters as many times as you want, and then save the images, without re-scanning the slide.
    
3. Multiple passes can increase shadow detail and reduce noise. The extent of that reduction is limited, but any little bit can be very helpful. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for an optimal number of passes. With my Canon FS4000US and VueScan, I use four passes for an “average” Kodachrome slide. A slide with significant shadows gets eight passes, and I’ve used 16 passes on a few underexposed slides. Increasing the number of passes eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns, but again every little bit helps when it comes to pulling detail out of dense Kodachrome shadows with an inherently noisy desktop scanner. Some scanners have small alignment problems that can accumulate to soften a scan after many passes. And some scanners don’t support multiple passes at all.
    
4. Set VueScan’s infrared cleaning (in the Filter tab) to “Light.” That will collect infrared data. Higher settings are more likely to create artifacts and lose detail. Check/tick the “Pixel Colors” and “Infrared Defect” boxes in the Color tab to see where VueScan has corrected dust and scratches. If it shows “corrections” on actual image details, infrared cleaning won’t work with the slide. Go back to the Filter tab, turn off infrared cleaning, and save the non-cleaned scan without re-scanning the slide. If the corrections are actual dust and scratches, turn off “Pixel Colors.” If you still see defects, try going back to the Filter tab, selecting progressively higher settings, and re-enabling “Pixel Colors.” You can make these changes without re-scanning the slide. Save the version that reduces defects the most without affecting image details.
    
5. Select 16-bit uncompressed TIFF output. Correcting the high contrast and odd color casts in Kodachrome scans may require extensive Curves adjustments. Retaining the scanner’s full bit depth (14 or 16 bits) in a 16-bit file gives you maximum latitude for manipulation. Major color corrections to an 8-bit image may create visible artifacts, such as “banding” in subjects or areas that have subtle color variations. The artifacts can be particularly troublesome in blue sky. If your image editor doesn’t support 16-bit editing, you may have to accept some color cast as the price of avoiding artifacts. At least save a 16-bit version of the scanner output. That way you won’t have to do a new scan if you upgrade your image editor.
    
6. The 12x16mm opening of a Kodak slide mount provides an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, the same as a standard television screen. But that doesn’t quite fit any standard American print size. It’s squatter than a 35mm frame (1.5:1) or a 5x7-inch print (1.4:1), but slightly wider than an 8x10-inch print (1.25:1). An 11x14-inch print comes closest at 1.27:1, so that’s how I usually crop my scans (with a very few cropped to 1.5:1).
    
7. Once I’ve cleaned and cropped a scan, I save it before doing any color or density correction. I then use NeatImage for overall noise reduction. Sometimes that might not sufficiently reduce grain in sky or shadow areas without unduly softening the rest of the image. In that case, I use a lower luminance setting in NeatImage, then select those areas and use Photoshop’s “Dust and Scratch” or “Surface Blur” filter, or some combination of Paint Shop Pro ’s “Salt and Pepper” and “Edge-Preserving Smooth” noise-reduction tools.
   
   After noise reduction, I find that Focus Magic’s “Fix Out-of-focus Blur” correction will noticeably increase the crispness of even sharp slides. I was surprised to discover this improvement and can’t really explain it (I suspect it’s related to the lower pixel count of the scans), but it’s now a routine step in my work flow for 110 slides. A low setting of 2 pixels, or perhaps 3 is appropriate. While the normal approach is to use a sharpening tool only after all other processing, I have found that Focus Magic does a better job with 110 slides (less added noise or graininess) on “flat” scans before any adjustment of color and density.
    
8. After noise reduction and Focus Magic, I then adjust the color and density as I would any other image.

Kodak introduced the 16mm 110 film format in April 1972 with their first Pocket Instamatic cameras. I still have a copy of the original full-page newspaper advertisement that announced “the little camera that takes big pictures.” In an attempt to get acceptable prints from 13x17mm negatives, Kodak replaced grainy Kodacolor-X with Kodacolor II and its new C-41 processing chemistry. Kodacolor II was the direct ancestor of every color negative film that exists today. The very same C-41 process— with some minor tweaking for the mini-labs now found in every supermarket— remains the standard chemistry for all those films.

Notwithstanding Kodak’s hype, the quality of prints from 110 Kodacolor II in the real world left much to be desired. The “big pictures” (9x13cm) had very noticeable grain, far worse than the older 35mm 126 film. And labs too often failed to deliver clean, sharp prints from 16mm negatives. Measured by sales numbers, 110 was quite a successful format. Most users valued the cameras’ small size more than print quality. But 110 met a rapid demise in the early 1980s with the arrival of compact, convenient auto-focus 35mm point-and-shoot cameras that offered much better print quality and weren’t much larger than the Pocket Instamatic.

Despite the inadequate color negative film, someone at Kodak clearly envisioned the Pocket Instamatic line as a “system” suitable for serious photography. The top-of-the-line Pocket Instamatic 60 had a very good 4-element f/2.7 lens with a coupled rangefinder; and even the cheapest of the original cameras had surprisingly sharp 3-element lenses. Kodak’s original line of 110 films included Verichrome Pan for black-and-white negatives, along with Kodachrome-X and Ektachrome-X for slides. Kodak updated the slide films to Kodachrome 64 and Ektachrome 64 in 1975.

The slide films, particularly Kodachrome, had good enough grain and resolution to take full advantage of the lenses. Photography magazines at the time ran articles with headlines like “Will the Kodak Pocket Instamatic Kill 35mm?” They included full-page enlargements and double-page spreads taken with the Pocket Instamatic 60. These pictures, along with rave reviews that owed at least some of their enthusiasm to Kodak’s advertising budget, showcased the cameras’ performance with slide film. When they did show enlargements from Kodacolor II, the results were predictably dismal.

Kodak labs returned mounted slides in special plastic 30x30mm mounts. These were intended for diminutive Pocket Carousel slide trays that only fit the cute little Pocket Carousel projectors. The slides and projectors could produce impressive results— I regularly projected slides on a 1.25-meter screen! To accommodate 35mm users who didn’t want to buy a special projector, Kodak sold boxes of 20 plastic adapters (enough for a 20-exposure cartridge of film). After snapping a little slide into an adapter, you could then put the assembly into a regular slide tray and projector. Unfortunately, the little 110 slides didn’t look anywhere near as impressive in a regular projector. With halogen bulbs not yet commonplace, the Pocket Carousels used a special very bright (and rather short-lived) bulb that increased the “snap” of projected slides. Regular projectors gave a dim and flat image when moved far enough from the screen to get a comparable viewing size.

Despite their image quality, 110-format slides were a marketing failure. Snapshooters who embraced 110 for its small size and convenience weren’t interested in slides. Advanced photographers who shot slides wanted something better than a Pocket Instamatic, and they probably didn’t want a new non-standard slide mount. Now that I have reached bifocal age, I can appreciate how difficult it really is to view and sort such tiny slides on a light box. Kodak discontinued the Pocket Carousel projectors in 1980, and 110 slide film in 1982. It’s amazing how long they kept those money-losing products on the market.

As for my own involvement with “110,” the Pocket Instamatic seemed like it would be a perfect choice for the trip to Europe my parents and I were planning in 1972. While I had a black-and-white darkroom (to go with an Instamatic 174 camera that used the older 126 cartridges), I didn’t know enough to question Kodak’s claims. Fortunately, we opted for slide film because we were so impressed with the (35mm) slides of a friend’s trip to Europe. It also helped that slide film and processing then cost much less than a set of prints.