# The ReelSlow8 Film Scanner **URL:** \ **Category:** Machine Design\ **Created:** [February 25, 2023, 7:28am UTC](https://forums.kinograph.cc/t/the-reelslow8-film-scanner/2491 "2023-02-25T07:28:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 24
**Author:** ![npiegdon](https://forums.kinograph.cc/user_avatar/forums.kinograph.cc/npiegdon/32/2729_2.png) [@npiegdon](https://forums.kinograph.cc/u/npiegdon)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2023, 6:38pm UTC](https://forums.kinograph.cc/t/the-reelslow8-film-scanner/2491/24 "2023-06-07T18:38:59Z")
> [@cpixip](#): > > The sensor will probably not feature 16bit resolution. It’s probably a 12bit sensor… You were right. Despite my hopes for around 14-bits on the Pregius sensor, I’ve since found a spec sheet that shows LUCID’s Triton camera lineup only uses a 12-bit ADC to read from it. Oh well. > [@PM490](#): > > Finally got around to make the port holes. Here is how it looks. Those are some clean cuts. How did you do the off-angle cuts so nicely? When I was brainstorming how I might turn these cake pans into an integrating sphere, I couldn’t think of an easy way to hold them at those angles. As an alternative to off-axis ports, I took @cpixip’s [advice](https://forums.kinograph.cc/t/lighting-research-results/1720/6) that the sphere didn’t need to be perfect and instead optimized for the simplest construction steps: I put the entrance and exit pupils on a straight line and just inserted the smallest possible baffle between the two. ![cutaway](https://forums.kinograph.cc/uploads/default/original/2X/5/59a1198f42c422f75658d5af28ad54a80e6eab29.jpeg) The little cone-like feature on the side facing the LED board is just to prevent the first light bounce from going directly back to the PCB. The other side is flat. ![parts](https://forums.kinograph.cc/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9317368dc047ee6d5bef5f35a3b3dcf0d33f4ecf.jpeg) I overestimated the wall thickness of the pans a little. While milling the smaller exit port, it ended up with a razor-like edge and you can see a little wobble in the cutout where there just wasn’t any material left. I suppose the thin wall at the exit works out in my favor for getting it a millimeter or two closer to the subject. The barium sulfate wasn’t as hard to work with as I was expecting. After some sanding, I sprayed everything with a white primer and then mixed a bunch of the powder into titanium white acrylic ink (mine was Liquitex brand). It still took 8 or 9 coats (and it probably wouldn’t hurt to do another five) before it was reasonably uniform looking. ![afterPaint](https://forums.kinograph.cc/uploads/default/original/2X/4/435593475949441da86dac4bbddc84b067c96d72.jpeg) And here it is fully assembled, on the rails, showing the front of the exit port. The mount (with the captive nuts) for the PCB is just held on with a couple drops of super glue for now. If that doesn’t last, I’ll use epoxy. Again, I was optimizing for speed-of-build this time. 😁 ![finished](https://forums.kinograph.cc/uploads/default/original/2X/4/4283ab5cc3188ccc0f7e1eb3612bd86daa3d2e24.jpeg) This was kind of an extra credit mini-project for June. During some early testing with the Köhler stuff, I saw how much the direct lighting was accentuating scratches and other oddities in the film. If I’m going to save the wet-gate/chemistry portion of this project until the end, I wanted to have a good proxy in the meantime to help hide those defects while I was still working out the rest. I probably shouldn’t have put my eye directly up to the exit port with (the dimmest of the) LEDs on, but I saw exactly what I was hoping to: a completely invisible baffle. The only discernible features inside the sphere are a faint seam between the two halves and the two little “tick marks” where the arms holding the baffle divide the seam line. I can’t believe how homogenous this light is! I focused on my calibration grid, put the sphere as close behind it as I could, then removed the grid. The resulting flat, gray image had a difference of only 2.6% brightness between the center and the darker two corners. I think I might be able to do better by tweaking the alignment a little. The other two corners were only 1.8% darker. The histogram is just a single spike with an (8-bit) std dev of 0.79. When you auto-contrast that out to the extremes, you can see the darker two corners. ![grayField](https://forums.kinograph.cc/uploads/default/original/2X/5/58de9c6833f7f79015d0cb0190bbf8d64027f484.jpeg) I think I found a few dust particles in the lens. 🤣 That’s the aperture blade pattern of the Componon-S lens. I’ve already tried cleaning the front without any effect. I hope they’re just on the back. But I expect they’re actually somewhere inside. It’s mostly a non-issue because everything in that image is taking place inside two (8-bit) gray values. --- _[View the full topic](https://forums.kinograph.cc/t/the-reelslow8-film-scanner/2491)._