The Kodak HR 500: the scanner at NASA's service

At Nation Photo, our Graphic Services team works alongside a powerful ally for digitizing your analog films: the Kodak HR 500! This professional film scanner, designed in the early 2000s, allows us to digitize your analog films, whether negatives or positives (slides), in high resolution, offering you exceptional image quality.

HR FOR 'HIGH RESOLUTION'

As its name suggests, this scanner is capable of scanning images at a very high resolution, often used for large-format prints or high-quality photographic archives.

SPEED

The HR 500 is also known for its scanning speed, enabling the processing of a large volume of films in a short amount of time, which is crucial in a professional environment like our photo lab.

IMAGE QUALITY

Thanks to its sensors and image processing technology, this scanner provides excellent detail, color, and grayscale reproduction, making it suitable for demanding uses such as archival preservation. The HR 500 offers grain structure closer to the actual film, finer and more realistic color nuances, and a tonal range in black and white that closely resembles the negative.

AND WHAT ABOUT NASA?

The collaboration between Kodak and NASA goes back several decades.
Kodak provided photographic equipment for various space missions, including the famous cameras used on the Moon. The HR 500 follows in this tradition by enabling the digital preservation of these precious images for future generations.

The American space agency used this technology to digitize and archive images from historic space missions such as Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini into 'High Resolution' digital files. These historic images, captured on film during various missions, were digitized with this scanner to preserve their quality and facilitate their access and distribution. Thank you, Kodak!