We think you might want to.
If you need to quickly decide, here’s a comparison picture of a full-frame scan versus one of our classic high-resolution scans:
You’ll notice that on top of the beautiful, organic fallout and the black edges, you get quite a bit more of your image.
This is why it’s called full-frame scans.
Full-frame scans allow you to see the entire image present on your negative. This is something that wasn’t possible until very recently.
For the story, the Fuji Frontier scanners we use used to be directly hooked up to printers. This was because back in the early 2000s, most people didn’t get scans like today but were interested in receiving printed images directly.
So traditionally, negatives would be developed, thrown in the scanner, and printed directly out of a chemical printer.
To reduce the room for mistakes and make printing more efficient, Fuji built physical masks into their scanners that delimited the printable area of the negative. This area is roughly 90% to 95% the size of the actual image. This was to ensure that even if the machine didn't frame the picture exactly, you’d never have black borders on your printed images. Because prints are kinda hard to edit. 😉
Today the process has changed quite a bit, and prints are no longer the important medium. Good quality scans are much more important.
And guess what? Scans are much easier to edit and manipulate. So suddenly, we don't really care about black borders. In fact, we really like them as they add quite some charm and an “organic feel” to the image.
But the Fuji scanners still have these built-in masks that are cropping into our images… Well not anymore! Some companies started to make new parts to replace the mask inside the scanners and allow for that beautiful full-frame look.
And we got them, just for you!
So what do you really get out of it?
1. Your full image, just like you composed it in your camera.
Our full-frame scans allow for the entirety of your image to be scanned, border to border. You, in fact, get up to 6% extra image compared to our regular high-resolution scans!
Here’s an overlay of the same image scanned with our regular machine and with our full-frame scanner:
You’ll notice that there’s a substantial difference between the two.
2. The black borders.
Since we opened shop, customers have been asking us on a daily basis if it’s possible to receive “scans with black borders”.
And for the first time, this technique for which you used to have to go through a painful flatbed scanning experience is available on our lab-grade professional scanners. It’s really the best of both worlds.
We really hope you’ll try them on your next order. And If you are still hesitant, here are some more examples of our high resolution, full-frame scans:
Full-frame scans are charged 2 euros extra to account for the extra work.
Just like on these examples, frames are not always 100% centred. While we strive for the most balanced results it can occur that the top or bottom black border is smaller or completely missing.