We made camera scanning easier, faster and more affordable.

The VALOI easy35 was designed to revolutionise film scanning at home, making it quick, easy and affordable. With this product anyone can scan film at home just by using a digital camera and macro lens. Our design ensures minimal hassle while retaining great speed, quality and an affordable price point.

Our experience with both camera scanning product design and crowdfunding planning is well proven in the past. The same team launched the professional-grade modular VALOI 360 product line in 2021 which was funded with a similar campaign in 2020, reaching over 175% funding. Since then, we have developed it into a staple product for scanning in the film community. With the VALOI team’s effort, the SantaColor campaign in 2022 also reached almost 200% funding. 

All-in-One High Quality Film Scanning Solution

The VALOI easy35 is a professional-grade scanning kit condensed into a small but powerful package. Putting together a camera scanning kit has never been easier.

You will only need to supply your own macro lens and camera, and the device is compatible with all interchangeable-lens cameras and most macro lenses. Equipped with a high-quality, bright light source this device is a true all-in-one scanning platform for your film: No stand, no light source and no separate film holder needed.

• Plug-and-Play Scanning at home
• Scan up to 10x faster than with a flatbed scanner
• Super compact: Fits in a small camera bag
• Professional-grade film holders for speed and quality
• Built-in light source for convenience and consistent quality
• Great materials for a long-lasting product
• Modular holders allowing formats smaller than 35mm
• No copy stand or tripod required, saving you space and money

The VALOI easy35 is made to make home scanning easy and fun. It takes the somewhat complex process of camera scanning and puts it all into a compact package that fits into your camera bag.

Maybe you have tried camera scanning, or used a flatbed scanner, and been frustrated by the results or process. With the easy35, the learning curve is minimal and the results are excellent because the design handles the issues users typically experience when scanning. At the same time, you get the speed and quality benefits associated with camera scanning.

Our experience creating the professional-grade VALOI 360 system has all been incorporated into the easy35, condensing all it into one easy-to-use, compact package that will deliver the same results as our professional system for 35mm film.

Scanning film at home is great for saving money, getting high quality results and having your hands on the whole creative process.

Based on price examples we found in the market, scanning at home can save you a lot of money: If you shoot, for example, 50 rolls of colour film every year, you can save 550€ yearly on labs costs even with just ‘normal’ lab resolution scans, or 800€ with high resolution. Alternatively, scanning a home archive of 2000 pictures, you could for example save 1000-2000€.

Results from scanning at home using a 24MP camera and a good macro lens will match even the best lab scanners, and with a higher-end setup you can even match the quality of legendary scanners like the Hasselblad Flextights.

Tight crop from a wider scene.

Even tighter crops from the same scene.
Left to right: Epson v850 (4800 DPI settings) || easy35 + Nex-5N + TTartisans 40mm || easy35 + S1R + Sigma 70mm 

Finally, it’s important for many photographers to be part of the whole creative process, from loading film to final print. Part of doing that is scanning at home – and now you can do that more easily and more efficiently than ever.

easy35 Features

You can find more technical details on features at the bottom.

Plug-and-Play Scanning

Scanning with a camera has never been easier. The design of the easy35 ensures that most of the setup is done for you. You just choose the right number of tubes, then attach it to your lens, adjust the rotation and start scanning. The design of the easy35 takes care of the rest for you, ensuring great results with minimal setup!

Scanning Film in Minutes

 

With the pull-through style holder, the easy35 allows you to scan film in minutes. Whether it’s a full roll or strips of 3 frames, you will be able to get great results much quicker than a traditional scanner.

With the easy35, capturing a roll of film takes 3-4 minutes. Converting those images into positives takes 5-10 minutes. In contrast, a traditional flatbed scanner takes 35-150min* (depending on resolution and use of ICE). 

*https://www.filmscanner.info/en/EpsonPerfection…

Super Compact Scanning Setup: Travel Light or Live Clutter Free

Desk space is precious – be it living in a small apartment or just not wanting the clutter in your life, the easy35 is easy to put away when you don’t need it. This setup is many times smaller than a flatbed scanner as you can see in the picture above.

Bring the easy35 with you when you travel, it can even fit into a small camera bag along with your camera. You can have your film developed while travelling, but get the same quality scans that you get at home instead of relying on an unknown lab.

Find the dimensions of the easy35 farther down.

Professional-Grade Film Holders

Cut-out view of the easy35 35mm Holder

Equipped with the knowledge from designing our professional scanning system, we have made a film holder that ensures no vignetting, total coverage of the negative, minimal reflections and great flatness while showing a small black border around your film. The design choices we made on these holders ensures that you get great results from the very first scan while benefiting from the great speed you can get from a camera scanning setup.

 

Built-in Light source

 

Scanning requires a good light, and we tried a bunch of them to find the right one. It is bright to ensure a sharp scan and will render accurate colours thanks to its high-quality LEDs. Best of all, it is built into the unit, so it’s always with you and always good – no questioning if you have the right light source. The light source has a battery that lasts hours of scanning, and USB-C charging.

Shaded from External Light

In the easy35, the film is shaded from external light – completely enclosed in the dark, anti-reflective tube between your lens and the holder, you can scan in broad daylight if you want to. There are no pesky reflections causing spots or nasty colour casts. This is a significant benefit over traditional camera scanning setups.

Materials

VALOI is all about making long-lasting products, and the easy35 is no different. We have chosen durable and stable aluminium tubes with finely machined threads. The body and film holders are made from strong but flexible Nylon material. These are not thin, brittle plastic parts that will break on their own after a few days of use. The VALOI easy35 will last you years or decades of scanning.

Modular Holders

The easy35, while being focused on 35mm film, does have a modular film holder system. The holders can be replaced in a few seconds, allowing you to use the normal 35mm holder, a 35mm slide holder, a 35mm holder showing sprockets, with more formats coming.

However, note that 120 film is unfortunately too large to fit onto the compact light source we have chosen. The easy35 will therefore not support medium format film. If you are looking for a system for 120 and other formats, we already make the VALOI 360 system.

Choose extra holders in the ‘extras’ during checkout for your perk.

 

 

Who is VALOI?

Our goal has always been to make great scanning solutions so people can enjoy shooting film more. We are a small brand based in Finland, part of Kamerastore, and we primarily develop new products for scanning film using a digital camera.

Since our launch of the VALOI 360 system in 2020, we have been tirelessly making camera scanning better, easier and more affordable. However, the modularity of the 360 system demands the user learn quite a lot of things before they get great results – and a number of things can go wrong.

With the easy35 we are changing that!

What You Get

As you can see from the perks, the crowdfunding price is heavily discounted from the retail price. Essentially you get are getting wholesale price, direct from us. Buying direct from us means all the support and direct replacements should any issues arise. You are also getting them first – before anyone else. Finally, you get to have a say in the design and manufacturing process, with input and direct contact with our team.

• Discounts up to 30%
• Get the device before anyone else, before it goes in the shops
• Get to have a say with direct input and contact with our team
• Help a new, unique category of camera scanning device to market 

Physically, in the box, you get:

• The VALOI easy35 body with a built-in light source
• easy35 compatible 35mm holder
• A set of 2x 40mm tubes, 1x 20mm tube and 1x 10mm tube made from aluminium
• Filter thread adapter of your choice
• Instruction manual

In addition you can purchase:

• Optional: Additional tube set for longer lenses
• Optional: easy35 35mm holder with visible sprockets
• The easy35 Slide Holder will only be available after launch

Technical Details

Below are a set of technical details about the product.

The VALOI easy35 body measures only about 90x 90x90mm (3.5×3.5×3.5″), about the size of a fist, A typical set of tubes on an average macro lens will make it about 160mm (6.3″) long. A small camera and lens combination with the easy35 can be as small as 240x120x90mm (9.5×4.7×3.5″), or about the size of a large water bottle.

 

 

The Importance of a Parallel Film and Sensor

Scanning film requires the camera sensor to be close-to perfectly parallel to the film. If it is not, you will experience that one side of the film is out of focus and that instead of having perfect 90 degree angle corners, the image appears to be skewed, so it looks like a parallelogram. This is usually something you have to take great care to ensure is right when scanning with other camera scanning systems.

With the easy35, the design ensures a near-perfectly parallel film and sensor. Since the device is attached to the front of the lens, which is parallel to the camera sensor, and the film holder is parallel within the easy35, there is no opportunity for the film to be anything but parallel. This ensures perfect scans every time with very little setup!

Light-system

From making our professional-level VALOI 360 system, we know a lot about light sources, and how light and reflections should be handled within a scanning system.

The light is a CRI 95+ rated, 81-bead bi-colour LED with a very high brightness. The CRI 95+ provides realistic, natural colour rendering due to the near-full spectrum of light output. The bi-colour LED means that you can scan in three modes:

• Warm for slides, as slides were made to be projected using a tungsten light
• Middle/neutral for black and white, as this will give you the most light intensity
• Cold for negative, as the colder light will help cancel out the orange mask of colour negative film and improve digital noise

With this light source, you will get shutter speeds between 1/30s and 1/160s, depending on the camera settings and film.

Besides the light itself, we have put lots of careful testing and design into getting the most of out this light source in a small package and light weight. The light chamber consists of 6 stages:

• The light is emitted from the LED and reflected towards the film as efficiently as possible
• The light is diffused very close to the LED, starting the diffusion process early which minimises the distance needed
• A white reflector between the first diffuser and the second ensures that light is not absorbed by the walls which would cause vignetting and lower light output
• A second diffuser, carefully placed at the perfect distance to maximise light output and evenness but minimise size ensures that the light is perfectly even
• The white reflector continues above the second diffuser, again ensuring the light is not lost and vignetting is not introduced at the last stage 
• The carefully tested distance from the second diffuser to the film plane ensures that, even if there is some dust on the second diffuser, this will be blurred out and not show up in the scans

Our thoroughly tested light system is optimal for scanning and ensures high shutter speeds, no vignette from the light, even back lighting and excellent colour rendering. It does all this in an impressively compact package.

Handling Reflections and Stray Light

As part of the overall light handling of the device, the film holders are designed for minimal reflections, maximum compactness and complete coverage of the negative.

The film is suspended over the light source, held between two edges that are only 1.5mm tall. This ensures light is not reflected down onto the film from the edge gripping it. From those edges, the holder tapers off at a 45° angle both below the film and above, ensuring minimal reflection onto the film.

Furthermore, below the film, the holder is designed to get out of the way of light from below, ensuring no vignetting, even when using wide-angle macro lenses for scanning. The diffuser area illuminating the film from below is about 70x70mm, of which we are only using the centre to avoid vignetting.

Finally, the film is shaded from light in the room – completely enclosed in the dark, anti-reflective tube between your lens and the holder, you can scan in broad daylight if you want to. There are no pesky reflections causing spots or nasty colour casts. This is a significant benefit over traditional camera scanning setups.

With the easy35 and its film holders, you are getting the best possible results as our design has taken care of many of the most common issues people encounter with camera scanning.

The Film Holder – Flatness and Scanning Area

Ensuring the film you are scanning is flat is one of the points that distinguish a good film holder from a great one. To achieve truly great film flatness, our holders have more complex internal geometry than some might think is necessary. When you push the film into the holder it is taken down a curve and sharply bent before the flat part of the holder. The bend is obviously outside of what the camera can see, but this bend right before the scanning area flattens the film mechanically across the flat scanning area. You can see the effect work yourself if you take a piece of film, bend it in the lengthwise direction, then try to also bend it in the short direction – it will not bend two ways. Our holders take advantage of that principle.

Another point we know is very important to many users, is that the scanning area is big enough that a small black border is visible around the film. To ensure this, we have tuned the size of the gate in tiny increments, making sure that even wide-angle lenses will see the whole frame with a small black border around it, while still keeping the strong light from the sprocket holes covered.

Delivery Times and Schedcule 

Producing a new product takes time – we have done most of the work ahead of time, but it will still take some time to go from pre-production prototypes to final product. The schedule looks something like the below – it is absolutely subject to change in both the shorter and the longer direction. We will do everything we can to smartly place orders and work in parallel to put the products in your hands as quickly as possible.

• 21st March – 20th April: Finalising the design and gathering funding
• 20th April: Funding period ends
• 25th April: Most urgent orders go out
• 10th May: Final changes have been validated and are ready for production
• 12th May: Most orders have been placed
• 3rd July: Most order have arrived and assembly/packaging starts
• 5th July: The first orders are shipping
• August 10th: All orders have finished shipping 

Risks

At the moment, we have produced a small run of pre-production units. We have made some small tweaks in the past few months and we expect to make a few more. However, the design and manufacturers for most of the parts are nailed down already.

As always with manufacturing, there is a risk that we manufacture a large batch of something only to find out that the parts either weren’t designed right or that the manufacturer didn’t make them to specification.

You have the right to know about that, but there are two reasons why that is unlikely and why it wouldn’t impact you: We have designed and manufactured similar products before, meaning we have experience dealing with pre-production and design validation. Secondly, we are an established brand tied to an even more established company, Kamerastore (Kameratori Oy, Finland). Both the brand, VALOI, and the company we are a part of, Kamerastore, have great interest in seeing this through and we will have the necessary funds to remanufacture things in the unlikely event that something goes wrong.  

Other Ways You Can Help

If you have already backed the project or if you can’t right now but still want to help, there are other ways to help us:

• Spread the word to your friends or on social media like Twitter or Reddit
• Head over to Instagram and follow us at @valoi.co
• Learn more about our other products at www.valoi.co
• Ask questions or give us input, either here in the comments or on hello@valoi.co

That’s it. Promise!