A film company from Indian Head, Sask., claims it has developed a new multi-spectral film scanner that is the fastest on the market.

“We have [a] 150-megapixel sensor, which is at the moment the largest sensor you can buy,” said Gerald Freyer, a partner in Film Rescue International.

The scanner has an achromatic digital back, which means it’s black and white, unlike the colour backs on digital cameras in cell phones or digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs), Freyer said.

It only takes a few seconds to develop an image, compared to a drum scanner, which takes 30 minutes or more, according to Freyer.

The multi-spectral scanner incorporates the merging of colours and bandwidths all in one to generate an image, avoiding issues that occur during the colorization of film, he said.

Modern cameras have a colour cast that is not made for digitizing film slides or negatives.

“We’re talking about [easily] $70,000 just for the sensor … that is not something you will have at home,” Freyer said.

Restoring old memories

Film Rescue International has been restoring old films since 1999.

“One big business is that somebody is cleaning up our grandma’s or parent’s house … and they find films [that were] shot from from 1950 or 1980, that were never processed,” Freyer said.

One of the coolest things the company has done was restoring a 140-year-old photo of women playing golf in Australia, he recalled.

Photographs can serve as a key historical archive, and preservation is crucial, he said.

“We want to make that accessible and we want to save that for the future. Because if we have that digital, then we know that that will last.”

The company’s owner, Greg Miller, developed the scanner through careful research and with the help of a German engineer he found online.

Freyer said he went to Germany last year and gave the engineer the materials to develop it. Once the completed scanner was finished, the engineer shipped it to Saskatchewan.

“We installed it here … there is no software you can buy online or somewhere … this is all handmade,” Freyer said.

Other components that set the scanner apart are its industrial lens, combined with an achromatic sensor and small banded LEDs, according to the company.

Happy customer

After many years of service with the Saskatchewan government, Lorne Scott has kept busy in retirement. A favourite hobby is photographing animals and birds.

He chose Film Rescue International to help him preserve 3,000 of his 20,000 film slides, he said.

“I’ve got some couple of cousins that are really promoting that we get these digitized. My sister said they’ll probably end up in the dumpster if they don’t,” he said.

“The photograph … stays still. You can really look at it and appreciate it … it’s certainly worth preserving these records of historical documents.”

Scott says he finds the best way to preserve film slides is to keep them in a dark, dry location and minimize dust build-up.

“Keep them sorted. If they lose the date, location and and who’s who on them, they soon become worthless.”