JJC FDA LED-1 Negative Copying Kit review: excellent results, low, low price

Pros

+ Neg holder keeps your filmstrips flat
+ Holder for two mounted transparencies
+ Bright USB-powered light panel

Cons

– 35mm only
– Lining up neg strips can be fiddly
– Some slight shadowing at edges on ‘thin’ negs

If you want to digitize your analog images, the usual advice is to get a scanner. But flatbed scanners with transparency adaptors don’t capture the full detail of 35mm negatives, cheap neg ‘scanners’ are poor quality and proper film scanners are becoming hard to find and are slow to use.

But there’s an easy solution. Just get a macro lens for your camera, light your negatives from behind and photograph them. You’ll need to do some careful positioning to get your camera exactly perpendicular to your negatives, and some way of keeping curled negatives flat – and of course you’ll need some kind of diffuse light source behind them.

The JJC FDA LED-1 Negative Copying Kit doesn’t come with a macro lens, but it has everthing else you need in a kit that’s easy to use, brilliantly thought out and cheap to buy. I bought mine on Amazon for just £27 in UK money,  though prices vary amongst different sellers and territories.

Features

The FDA LED-1 Negative Copying Kit comes with each item in its own box fitting neatly into an outer box that’s sturdy enough for storage and repeated use. You get:

• The LED lamp unit itself
• A cable with a USB micro plug at one end for the unit, a Type A plug for your USB power source, and a control pod in the middle for power and brightness adjustments
• A 6-shot filmstrip holder for negatives
• A two-slot holder for mounted transparencies

You’ll also need a camera with a macro lens and a tripod for careful alignment, but that goes for most negative/slide copying kits.

The light panel itself is extremely powerful. At full brightness it offers almost daylight exposure levels, but I typically use it dimmed down a little. Longer exposures make no difference when I’m using a tripod and it saves me getting dazzled.

Design and operation

Everything is made of plastic, as you would expect at this price, but everything fits together and works well. You do need a bit of dexterity and patience to get a negative strip to line up properly in the holder and, depending on the accuracy of your camera’s spacing, you may not get every negative in the strip lined up exactly – but with practice you can get pretty close.

The filmstrip holder slides into the lamp unit and is held in place with springs. There’s a little bit of play, but with a moment’s jiggling it’s level enough. One neat feature is the pair of windows above and below each frame which show the film type and the frame number.

You can’t quite lay the lamp unit flat on its back, and while there is a fold-out stand to place it on a flat surface at an angle, I found it easier to mount it on the tripod – there is a tripod mount in the base – and then get both the lamp unit and the camera vertical and perpendicular.

Sliding the film holder to and fro does move the lamp unit slightly unless you’ve got it really locked down on a solid tripod. I used a table top tripod and made small manual adjustments to the positioning as I went along, using the edges of each negative to judge the alignment.

Overall, once set up the JJC Negative Copying Kit is quick to use, and certainly a heck of a lot faster and more convenient than a film scanner. 

Performance

I used my mirrorless OM System PEN E-P7 and 60mm macro lens for all my copying experiments and found its 20MP MFT sensor had more than enough resolution to record every ounce of detail in even my best negatives. Better still, analog negatives have a limited contrast range so I had no trouble with clipped highlights or shadows.

The only issue I did have was that the edges of  filmstrip holder between the film and the light panel did cast a very slight shadow at the edges of some particularly ‘thin’ negatives. Once reversed, this showed up as a slight lightening effect on perhaps 1-2mm of the image around the edges once the images had been adjusted for a full tonal range.

Like I say, this only affected underexposed or under-developed negatives, and by the time you’ve straightened and cropped images for composition, the problem may go away on its own. Otherwise, you might need to just crop in a little further from the edge.

Value

The JJC FDA LED-1 Negative Copying Kit really is excellent value for money. It’s pretty lightweight and can be a little fiddly to set up, but compared to film scanning it’s a breeze. You’re going to need your a digital camera and macro lens, of course, but I’m guessing you’ve got a camera already, and if you don’t have a macro lens you can always look around for an inexpensive used one.

I would much rather use this kit and a proper camera than a cheap desktop scanner with its own sensor. These might be all right for a bit of fun, but the quality is not going to be in the same league.

Verdict

Of all the different ways you might digitize your analog negatives, I think using a camera, a macro lens and a translucent panel for backlighting is the quickest and simplest way. This JJC kit takes care of both the lighting and the filmstrip mounting, and it does it at a low, low price. I think it’s great, and a super-cheap and convenient way to digitize your analog image collection. It doesn’t do medium-format or large format originals, but for that you could just go even more low-tech and get a lightbox, place your originals directly on its surface and photograph them directly.