Just how well does Nikon’s brand-new ES-2 digitizer fare for converting old slides and negatives?
Dust off your old 35mm film negatives and slides and give them a new lease of life by converting them to digital images with a D850 and this handy adapter
Nikon’s Film Digitizing Adapter ES-2 kit harnesses the power of the D850’s 45.7MP resolving power to create exceptionally high-resolution digital scans of your old analogue film negatives and slides; whether they be colour or monochrome. You will also need one of three compatible Nikon macro lens in order to use the ES-2.
The ES-2 kit is actually far simpler than its price tag suggests. In the box is the ES-2 adapter itself. This is similar to a lens hood, but can be extended/retracted to fine-tune focus; its front is covered by a translucent panel that illuminates your films evenly from behind. Into the adapter you can then slide either the FH-4 Strip Film Holder, or the FH-5 Slide Mount Holder – both included in the kit. The final two elements in the kit are a pair of adapter rings, required for mounting the ES-2 on Nikon’s 60mm f/2.8 Micro lenses.
The only other item required – apart from a D850 – is some form of lighting directed at the front of the ES-2 to illuminate your film or slides. A small daylight-balanced LED light panel is ideal, preferably one with a high colour rendering index to ensure accurate colour illumination. With the digitizing adapter screwed to your lens’s filter thread and film mounted in the holder, you’re ready to scan. The D850 needs to be in Live View, whereupon you can press the ‘i’ button and scroll down to the Negative Digitizer option. This lets you choose between scanning monochrome or colour negatives, if you go for the latter, the camera will automatically invert the colours from negative to positive. It’s then just a matter of lining up your exposure to scan and manually focus (activating focus peaking can help with this).
Nikon has been keen to make the process as quick and easy as possible, but this comes with compromises… There are no options for adjusting colour or contrast in-camera, and the images are saved as high quality JPEGs, with no TIFF or Raw option. You also need to be careful when scanning multiple film negatives, as although the film holder has indentations that automatically aligns each exposure, it’s still easy to knock the film out of alignment.
It’s quite a simple piece of kit when you consider what it can do
Performance
With some time, patience and practice it’s possible to achieve incredibly detailed digital copies of your old analogue photos. You can even get copies of formats that exceed the resolution of super-slow 35mm film stocks, like the legendary Kodachrome 25 or Fujifilm Velvia 50. However, while detail may be flawless, image quality isn’t entirely perfect. When scanning C41 colour negatives, the D850’s automatic colour inversion isn’t always accurate, and you may need to manually remove a colour cast to get the best possible quality copies.
If you end up scanning multiple exposures of a similar scene, this can result in the camera automatically choosing a slightly different overall tone for each exposure. Meaning that you’ll need to do further postprocessing to match colour across a batch of shots. The restricted dynamic range of even high-quality JPEGs could also be undesirable if you’re out to make the best possible digital copies of your highly prized analogue images.