I have a ton of negatives and positives that I’m trying to identify and organize, 35 mm and medium format. Some of them are in dedicated binders, but many are just shoved in various envelopes, just as I got them from a photo lab. I tried using ma iPad for viewing, but it’s a pain. The screen shuts down after a while, the touch screen function often interferes while I’m dragging the film across the screen and while viewing with a loupe, the screen pixels are really distracting. So I decided I would benefit from a dedicated light box.
There are lots of light boxes to choose from, but I didn’t want to get the first cheap one I stumble upon. I’m sure they can do a good job, but I decided on a Kodak light box (Kodak.com link, Kodak.eu link). It’s advertised as having better color accuracy (“98% Accurate Color Restoration” they say) and I like the option to choose different sizes. I got the 5″x7″ version because it can be powered by batteries and it’s not too large. I should emphasize that it’s much cheaper to get it directly from Kodak website than from Amazon. I got mine for 40 € with shipping, while 4″x5″ version is almost 60 € on Amazon.

The light box arrived quickly and it’s well packed in a nicely designed box. The light intensity cannot be adjusted, but I don’t mind it at all. The viewing area comfortably fits two strips of medium format film. It’s made of plastic that has a nice light texture, so it won’t easily slip out of your hand. It also looks sturdy enough. Now, since I have a couple of high quality professional light measurement devices, I used them to measure how the light box performes.
Sekonic C-800 spectrometer accurately measures incident light (lux) but also the light spectrum. I made the measurement in a darkened room with the light table being the only light source. I put the sensor a few centimeters above the light box center and here’s the result:

Color temperature is very near 5000 K, just as advertised on the box (it says 5000 K +/- 270 K). Ra is color accuracy, 96 is pretty high, but just a little bit short of 98% Kodak claims. For me, this doesn’t matter. I’m sure every source above 90 would be fine, and it’s great to know the Kodak light box is really high quality. Delta uv is the deviation from a perfect black body radioator and it is minimal, so this is also a great value. The light spectrum shows a high peak in blue which is characteristic for all LED light sources. I’ll take the opportunity to warn you that this peak should be minimized as far as possible for your home and outdoor LED lights because it inhibits the production of melatonine hormone which regulates out circadian rhythm – you should always use lights with 2700 K CCT value, or even less. This is not important during daylight, but it’s very important before bedtime. Anyway, apart from that peak, you can see nice even values in green towards red, a part of the spectrum where ordinary LEDs usually have another peak (but more gentle) towards red. So the spectrum of this light box is really high quality.
With the very expensive Konica Minolta LS-160 luminance meter I measured the surface luminance of the light. I measured in 9 locations – left, middle, right and I repeated this for top, middle and bottom of the light box. Again, measured in a dark room, this time froma distance of approximately 1 meter. I probaby should’ve measured for a bit further away. The values would perhaps be more even, but you should know the luminance of a surface does not change with the distance. Luminance tells us how bright a surface looks to our eyes and it’s measured in cd/m2. The values I got are as follows:
979 | 990 | 1006 |
1065 | 1108 | 1070 |
1087 | 1173 | 1036 |
The average is 1057 cd/m2 (1065 being the median) which is pretty bright, as it should be. The recommended value for computer monitors is 150-200 cd/m2. Your mobile phones, tablets, laptops…can provide higher numers so to be clearly visible in daylight. To my eye, the light box surface seems pretty evenly illuminated, but the measurements show variations of around 10%. This seems a little high, but it doesn’t bother me as I don’t plan to use the light box for “scanning” with a digital camera, just for visual inspection. Viewing films with a loupe was to my eye pretty comfortable.
Here are two photos I made with my iPhone, with colorful strips of medium format diapositives (Kodak E200) I shot a long time ago with my Holga. This was a time when I often used the Lomography Holga 120 GFN with it’s colorful flash filters in a local night club.


So there you have it, I hope this test was useful. I can highly recommend the Kodak Light Box to everyone serious about their analog film collection. The quality is definitely there and probably better than cheap options.