Ektar 100 - TMX 100 - Velvia 50

This to compare the new Ektar 100 against two of the best films available. (Velvia 50 is on its way from the lab)

 

The crops below represent only 3% of the area of the 35mm frame! They were scanned on a Collscan 9000 without ICE.

 

 

Straight from the scanner:

http://shutterclick.smugmug.com/gallery/6616619_YJEwK#421782893_3FL6u-O-LB

 

Filtered and sharpened:

http://shutterclick.smugmug.com/gallery/6616619_YJEwK#421783213_s6ekF-O-LB

 

 

Preliminary observations:

 

- Resolution: When comparing the films on the microscope the scanner captured all the information available on

Ektar whereas the resolution of TMX extends about 20-30% pass the limitations of the scanner. TMX comfortably

outresolves Ektar.

 

- Grain: Both are ridiculously fine.

 

- Other: I noticed light bleeding on Ektar around the blocky areas of the resolution chart. These are on the

negative itself (on both the main Ektar roll and the secondary Ektar control). I do not know whether this is a

characteristic of the film or the result of the Costco processing machine.

 

 

I will add the Velvia scans as soon as I receive them.

I could believe that the edge effects in the developing process would not be exactly uniform for all three emulsions. Or, the Costco machine could be out of process control, causing the edge effects to be inconsistent...

The light bleed was only on the Ektar rolls (2). Both developed at Costco 1 week apart.

The light bleed if from Costco - I also get this when I send them film. At first thought it was my Dynax 7, but noticed it only happens at Costco, never at Target. Maybe a charactyeristic of their machines, because they do excellent quality work otherwise.

Thank you for the info Randall. Did you notice it in normal pictures? I had them develop some Ektar portraits and landscapes and they were fine. It seems to show only in the extreme contrast of the resolution chart.

For example, this is a crop of a picture of a tree, very strong contralight contrast. Developed at Costco as well - no halos.

 

http://shutterclick.smugmug.com/gallery/6616619_YJEwK#421885929_vCHzj-O-LB

 

By the way, no color processing was done, this is how saturated this film comes from the Coolscan.

In this link I sharpened the images for ease of resolution comparison. This will exaggerate grain. I added the 40D (also 3% sensor area).

 

http://shutterclick.smugmug.com/gallery/6616619_YJEwK#421902416_ibL4V-O-LB

One question did you resample the 40D image to bring the image size up to that of the film scans.

Nearest Neighbor 200%.

Most people would not use nearest neighbour to upscale a digital image. Unless one is photographing black and white squares nearest neighbour would be a poor choice for pictorial use.

Here is the 40D at 100%.

 

http://shutterclick.smugmug.com/gallery/6616619_YJEwK#422855889_gG2Ck-O-LB

Feel free to resample and post for comparison if you wish.

I can't get the image off the page. Resampling with bicubic won't increase the resolution the test charts will still be worse than the film but it does help the pictorial elements of the image because jaggies are not so apparent.

Agree.

 

I just removed the download protection in case you want to pull them.

Thanks heres a small section I resample to 200% using nearest neighbour.<div></div>

Here is one with bicubic<div></div>

The bicubic wont add resolution that is not there but is does help with what we have. The text SPICED CLASSICS is much nicer looking with bicubic. Now if this were a portrait it could mean the difference between smooth eyelashes and jaggy ones. Antother good example would be of clouds with nearest neighbour they would show pixelation but with bicubic the image would interpolate very well.

Clouds would be a bad example really, hard curved or diagonal edges benifit more.

You are right it looks better but doesn't change the resolution (although some people like to believe otherwise). Thank you for the contribution.

 

Wouldn't it be nice if you could shoot with a digital camera and use software to achieve the resolution of film?

Mauro Franic...

 

Thank you for your informative posts. Where did you get/purchase the chart, please, and how much was it?

 

Tom

Tom, I can email you the PDF of the chart, you need to print at max dpi - on at least 13x19 on an HP B8350 (must be max dpi - not best). Send me your email address directly and I'll send it to you.

 

If you don't have a printer large enough, you can can still be ok but you may not be able to use on the finest lpph.

You can also download it from here:

 

http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/ISO_12233-reschart.pdf

So this is a 4X6mm part of the frame? That would be about 3% of the area of a 35mm frame.

We talked about dev at Costco and Target. Did anyone check with Walmart yet?

John, 3.5mm x 7.5mm.