- The Valoi easy35 V2 is an at-home film scanner for digitizing 35mm film negatives
- It requires a digital camera, a 1:1 macro lens, and negative conversion software
- It’s a compact, portable unit with a built-in light source
Shooting film is an expensive business, and I’m always on the lookout for ways to make it cheaper. As such, the Valoi easy35 v2 immediately caught my attention, with its promises to make the process of scanning film negatives at home into something, well, easy. Okay, I’m interested.
Paying to get negatives scanned and digitized is an ongoing cost that adds up over time — and since I live in a fairly small apartment in a city, a large flatbed film scanner isn’t a practical option for me. The Valoi easy35 V2, however, is a compact cube with about the same desk footprint as a large coffee mug. Even with its raft of accessories, it’s easy to store, easy to transport — and at $272 / £199 / AU$337, it’s cheaper than high-end scanners, too. Color me even more intrigued.
But before you get too excited, be aware that this is not a standalone film scanner. Portable self-contained film scanners do exist, like Kodak’s ultra-cheap Slide N Scan, but their quality is pretty poor. Instead, the Valoi Easy 35 V2 works by connecting to your high-resolution camera and your 1:1 macro lens. You do have a high-resolution camera and a 1:1 macro lens, right?
Indeed, this isn’t necessarily the super-simple, anyone-can-do-it film scanner that the word ‘easy’ in the name perhaps implies. But if you’ve got the kit and you scan a lot of film, it could save you money in the long run — and as I found when I tried it out, the process can get pretty addictive.
Valoi easy35 V2: In use
The Valoi easy35 V2 comes as a kit — as well as the cube-shaped scanning module itself, with its built-in light source, you also get a couple of extension tubes for ensuring your lens can operate at the correct focal distance, and some step-up adapters that allow you to connect lenses of various filter thread sizes to the 62mm-thread tubes. While the unit itself is smooth plastic, these accessories are all metal, and feel suitably premium as a result.
In terms of compatible lenses, the distance between your negative and the front of your lens needs to be less than 230mm. Valoi recommends that if you’re using a full-frame system, you’re best off with a lens with a focal range between 55mm and 105mm; for APS-C, it’s 40mm to 70mm; and for Micro Four Thirds, the makers recommend between 35mm and 60mm.
I was using a Fujifilm X-T5, since with its generous resolution of 40.2MP, it would easily offer enough pixels to make the scanning process worth the effort. I paired it with the TTArtisan 40mm F2.8 — an affordable manual focus macro lens that is Valoi’s budget recommendation for use with the scanner.
Fitting the parts together is simple enough — I only needed to use one adapter and extension tube, but depending on your lens, you may need to stack multiple. The unit itself has one-button operation; you simply turn it on to activate the light (it’s battery-powered and recharges via USB-C). Negatives are loaded carefully into the holder at one side, fed through the scanner for your camera to snap, before emerging out of the other side. You’ll need to ensure that the negative is correctly focused — it helps to use a nice clear shot with a well-captured subject, ideally a person. And then, you’re away.
That’s when I started to get addicted. See, I have a lot of negatives. Like, a lot, a lot. And once the Easy 35 V2 is in position and your lens and camera are set up correctly, the process of scanning is incredibly quick — feed, snap, feed, snap. You can scan entire rolls in minutes. I will say that on my first few attempts, a lot of my scans came in a little crooked and I couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing wrong — but fortunately I had enough latitude to crop and straighten without impacting the image too much.
Of course, once you’ve got those digitized negatives, you still need to convert them. You have a number of options — it brings me no pleasure to say this as I am on the record as an Adobe critic, but by far the quickest and best is pairing Lightroom Classic with the plugin Negative Lab Pro, the latter of which offers a free trial of 24 conversions and then costs a one-time price of $99. There are other options, but they tend to be either excessively complicated (Darktable) or a bit too rudimentary (Lomography’s free online tool).
Negative Lab Pro takes the RAWs of your digitized negs (oh, yes, you really should shoot in RAW) and automates the conversion process into a single click. Once this is done, it provides an editing panel, and you shouldn’t be afraid to get stuck in and make the final image look the way you want it, editing attributes like color temperature and tint to taste. If you don’t have the time or patience to tweak sliders, NLP offers a few presets for a quick spruce-up — I found that the ‘Kodak’ profile generally delivered pleasing results from Kodak negatives, naturally. You can see a few of my resulting scans below.
Image 1 of 12
Valoi easy35 V2: Is it worth it?
I love this thing. I really love it. Setting it up was a pain — I had to get hold of some pretty specific gear, and lay it all out on my floor for want of a better working surface. It all feels a bit rustic and inelegant — for me, the camera and the box didn’t sit level when connected. I ended up wedging the spare film holder underneath to balance it, and was later amused when I watched a video on Valoi’s YouTube channel and they recommended doing exactly that.
However, the scanning process itself was unbelievably fluid, easy and even fun. I could have fed my negatives through this thing for hours. I still might! And having this setup on standby at home would mean I’d never have to pay to have negs scanned again, which is a mightily tempting thought.
I don’t think it’s true to say that the Valoi Easy35 V2 makes scanning accessible to the masses. The masses don’t all own sharp macro lenses with the correct filter thread size (you should have heard the noise I made when I realised that the Fujifilm XF 30mm f2.8 R LM WR Macro wasn’t going to fit, even with all those step-up adapters). But for those who have the capacity, it makes negative scanning at home joyous and fun, and on that note I’m going to step away from my keyboard so that I can go scan some more.
With thanks to Wex Photo Video (UK) and Fujifilm who loaned some of the equipment used for this article.
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