Even over 30 years after these machines were built in Germany, Drum Scanners remain the ultimate way to digitize film. This particular machine, the Heidelberg Tango, is a 550lb piece of spectacular German engineering. Utilizing a large acrylic tube (the drum) and a series of precisely calibrated photo multiplier tubes (PMTs) this machine is capable of scanning film at 11,000 pixels per inch. While the resolving power of most film stocks is well below this, having a drum scan of even a 35mm frame can give you a 50MP photo giving plenty of information for poster sized prints.

With larger formats like 120, 4×5, 8×10, the real limit is how big do you want to print. a 6×6 image can comfortably give you prints several feet wide, and with 4×5/8×10, it’s actually prudent to to scan at lower resolutions for the sake of realistic file sizes. However with larger formats there’s the ability to scan at higher resolutions for effective cropping of images, which is something I do semi-regularly when my 8×10 just didn’t quite have a long enough lens for a scene. In the future I’ll be updating this page with examples of scans to demonstrate what a Tango is capable of.