I tried the pixl-latr negative holder fully expecting to dislike it, and now I use it for every scan I do. It actually speeds up my workflow, which I genuinely was not expecting from yet another piece of kit.
This article covers my whole scanning setup, why a holder matters at all (negatives curve, light panels bow, Newton’s rings), the alternatives I tried first, and the pixl-latr itself. If you scan your own film, there should be something useful in here.
What “DSLR scanning” actually means
The phrase is a bit outdated, but it has stuck. DSLR scanning means digitising film negatives by photographing them with a digital camera positioned over a light source, rather than using a traditional flatbed or film scanner.
Both halves of the phrase are slightly wrong now. Not many DSLRs are being sold these days, so the camera is more likely to be a mirrorless. And it is not really “scanning” in the line-by-line sense a flatbed scanner does it. You are just taking a photograph of your negative, with the negative backlit, and inverting the result in software.
But that is what people search for and that is what people call it, so I will call it that here.
Why digitise at all
You shoot film for the look, the process, the negatives. Then you want to share the results, post them online, send them to a friend, get prints made, whatever. None of that works with a physical negative. So you need a digital file. That is the whole reason.
Some people send their negatives off to a lab and ask for digital scans alongside the prints. Some people use dedicated film scanners. And some of us digitise at home with whatever we already have, which usually means a digital camera and a light source.
The setup
Here is my actual scanning rig.
A monitor stand clamped to the desk, which provides a rigid vertical column over the desk surface. Cheap Amazon job.
A Manfrotto super clamp on the monitor stand, holding everything that follows.
A Neewer macro slider, which lets me fine-tune the camera position above the negative for focus and framing.
A digital camera on the slider. I started with a Sony A7R II, then an A7 III, and recently I have sold most of my full-frame gear and switched to a Sony A5100, which is what is on the rig now. The pixel count of the A5100 is fine for sharing online and for moderate print sizes. If you want to print big from your scans, more pixels help, but it is not the bottleneck for most uses.
A macro lens. I started with a Pentacon Electric 50mm f1.8 plus extension tubes on a Sony E to M42 adapter, and the results were genuinely weird. I do not know why, but the images came back distorted in a way I could not solve. I gave up and bought a 7Artisans 60mm f2.8 macro lens, which turns out to be an excellent piece of glass. Manual focus only, but for scanning that is what you want anyway.
A cheap LED light panel from Amazon. Mine is one of those unbranded Chinese ones meant for tracing. Genuinely good, with one issue I will come back to.
That is the rig. The whole thing sits in one corner of my office, which is normally not on camera because the rest of the office is a tip.
![PLACEHOLDER: the scanning setup, showing the monitor stand, super clamp, macro slider, camera, and light panel on the desk]
Why you need a holder at all
This is the question I had to answer for myself before I would try the pixl-latr. I had been scanning by laying the negative flat on the light panel and pressing the shutter. What is the problem?
Three problems, as it turns out.
Negatives curve. A 4x5 sheet of film will sit reasonably flat on a panel because the format is rigid enough. But a strip of 120, or a 35mm frame, has curl built into it from being on a spool. When you lay it on the light panel it does not sit flat. It curves up at the edges by fractions of a millimetre, which is enough to put parts of the frame out of focus when you photograph it. The centre might be sharp and the edges soft, or vice versa.
Newton’s rings. This is an optical phenomenon you get when the negative is in direct contact with a flat surface like the light panel or a piece of glass above it. You see faint rainbow-coloured rings in the scan, caused by interference between the two surfaces. The exact physics I will not pretend to fully understand, but the practical result is real and ugly. Google it for examples.
LED panels bow. Mine does, anyway. It has feet in all four corners and the middle sags very slightly under its own weight. So even if I am scanning a flat 4x5 negative, there is a small but real curvature across the surface I am laying it on. Same focus problem as before.
The solution to all three is the same. Suspend the negative in a fixed position above the light panel, not in contact with it, and held flat by something that does not care whether the panel underneath is perfectly flat.
That is what a negative holder does.
What I tried before the pixl-latr
For a while I had a Lomography Digitaliza. I disliked it intensely. The main issue was speed. Your film has to be cut into strips and loaded into the holder. With 120 that is three frames per strip. Once you have scanned those three frames you have to take the whole thing apart, load the next strip, set everything up again, and continue. I am impatient. The Digitaliza slowed me down so much that I got rid of it.
After that I was scanning freehand for a long time. Holding negatives in place on the panel, trying to flatten them with my fingers, hitting the shutter and hoping the focus was even. Sometimes it was, often it was not.
When Hamish Gill of 35mmc (the creator of the pixl-latr) gave me one to try, my immediate reaction was that I did not want another piece of kit slowing my workflow down. I had been burned by the Digitaliza. I assumed this would be more of the same.
I was wrong.
The pixl-latr in practice
The pixl-latr is a 3D-printed plastic frame that holds your negative in a fixed position above the light panel. Out of the box it handles 35mm, all the common 120 formats, and 4x5. It costs roughly £37 at the pixl-latr.com site including most of the format inserts. Individual extra inserts (for things like glass plates, 6x6 slides, APS, 127, 110, sprocket-hole 35mm) are each around £6 to £8. None of it is expensive.
The whole point is that the negative is held flat, in a known position relative to the camera, every single time. Once you have focused the camera on a test negative, that focus stays correct for every subsequent negative you load, as long as you do not move the rig.
Here is what scanning each format looked like in practice.
4x5. Slot the negative into the 4x5 frame, line it up, fire the shutter on a two-second timer to avoid any camera shake. Done. Onto the next one.
![PLACEHOLDER: a 4x5 negative loaded in the pixl-latr ready to scan]
120. Change to the 120 mask. Then this is where it gets satisfyingly fast. With a strip of 120 in the holder you can just push down on the bottom edge of the holder, slide the film along to the next frame, and shoot. You can roll through an entire roll of 120 (12 frames at 6x6, fewer at larger formats) without taking anything apart. Three frames to a strip stops being a problem because you can just thread the next strip in and keep going.
35mm. Same principle. I scanned a 24-frame roll of 35mm in roughly four minutes including a few stops to check focus. That is the kind of turnaround time I am looking for. Bang, slide, bang, slide.
Glass plates. I have some 3¼ by 4¼ glass plate negatives. The pixl-latr does a glass-plate insert for these. It drops straight into the main frame, the glass plate sits in it, and you scan it like anything else.
![PLACEHOLDER: a strip of 35mm being scanned in the pixl-latr, mid slide between frames]
Drawbacks
The honest list of things I do not love:
You cannot include the edges of the frame in the scan. The holder masks each format to its standard frame size, which means you lose the sprocket holes (for 35mm) and the frame numbering visible on the rebate of 120. If you like that look, you cannot get it with the standard inserts. There is a sprocket-hole 35mm insert as an add-on, which gets some of that back.
That is basically the only complaint.
What surprised me
I expected the pixl-latr to slow me down. It actually speeds me up.
The reason is consistency. With my freehand setup I was getting a steady drip of scans that were soft in one corner or had Newton’s rings or were slightly skewed, and I would rescan them. That cost me time. With the pixl-latr the failure rate has dropped close to zero. Focus is consistent across the frame because the negative is genuinely flat. No Newton’s rings because the negative is not in contact with the panel. Framing is consistent because the holder positions the negative the same way every time.
The quality bump on individual scans is real but not massive. Same lens, same camera, same panel. The difference is in the corners and edges of the frame, which are now sharp instead of sometimes-sharp. The bigger benefit is the consistency and the speed.
I scan in batches. After a productive period I might develop fifteen rolls at once. I do not have time for a process that takes half an hour per roll, or I lose heart and the negatives sit in their archival sleeves for months. The pixl-latr lets me rattle through them in the same evening, which means more of my own film gets digitised, which is the whole point.
Should you buy one
If you scan your own film and you are currently doing it freehand on a light panel, yes. The price is genuinely low (£37 plus a few quid for extra inserts) and the workflow improvement is real.
If you have a setup that already works for you, you already know whether you need this. Probably not.
If you are buying your first holder and looking at the options, I would go with the pixl-latr over the Lomography Digitaliza based on my experience with both. The pixl-latr is faster, simpler, and supports more formats.
I will keep using it. That is the highest compliment I can pay it.