A camera sensor is sort of like paper if you think about it for a second
A while back a friend said something in passing about people using enlargers for scanning negatives, and it kinda got stuck in my head. Had a thought earlier that like, if you just focused the projection onto the camera's sensor as if you were printing it, you'd have a well-resolved image. Rather than getting a "normal" DSLR scanning rig with a big macro lens, you could just do it like this.
And in principle it works. That third picture is the frame I had loaded, flipped n spun n inverted in RawTherapee.
And it really does just mostly work. The camera's just sat on a tripod, coarsely aligned with the enlarger. Might not be super apparent but leaned back, my enlarger's head is actually falling further back, so it's not even flat and level. Positioning these two things relative to each other stood up like this isn't super easy.
I think setting the enlarger up vertically like normal and laying the camera down on its back, aimed up, is gonna be easier. The enlarger's controls are much simpler to use in that orientation. If I get like... a cheap XY table (XY tables solve all problems) I could align the camera sensor more precisely below the head and get it to land exactly. The R8 has a full-frame sensor so I could probably get 1:1 shots with this.
I've got my 80mm lens on there, with the focus at full extension and the camera super close. It might be in front of the focal plane, I'm not 100% sure. The camera's focus peaking suggested it was pretty well focused, and the zoomed-in image looked okay. I've gotta keep that in mind, if it even matters, really. For 35mm it'll be 1:1 but medium format is gonna be like 1:2 unless I do stitching (which I might do... thinking hard about XY tables)
This also makes it possible, not super easy, to scan the medium format negatives I have. I don't have a scanner and for No Particular Reason I haven't taken them to the lab to have them do it either, so they're either just negatives or negs + prints. Much to think about
So just hammering this together by setting some stuff on a table pointing at each other works Alright. The film scanner is definitely less fuss, and you can tell it's much sharper. You can clearly see the paint lines on the 2 on the left, but they're fuzzier on the right. I also hucked this thru the camera's monochrome + jpeg compression, then adjusted levels real quick in the editor, but still. Kinda works.