minox negative scanning

I developed some Agfa 25 in Xtol, and scanned the black and white negatives in a

flatbed scanner at 3200 dpi. The 4 x 6'x are excellent, even with no special mount,

and the negatives inside a transparent 4 x 5 film envelope. Even the 5 x 7's are not

bad. But oddly, the unsharp mask seems to make the prints worse instead of better.

The unsharp mask gives me golfball grain. Is this true grain or noise? Has anyone

found a good way to scan black and white negatives, sharpen them, yet avoid the

extreme appearance of grain?

If you want less grain, try Kodak Technical Pan, with which you can

get 8x10" with no visible grain.

Black and white does not scan at all well and demand a lot of afterscan image processing magic to squeeze something reasonable out of them. Agfa 25 is even among B&W materials among the worst to scan--- the fine grain induces a lot of noise. I think you would have better luck with Kodak BW400CN masked chromogenic negative or Agfa Scala diapositive materials. These, unfortunately, are not available in factory slit cartridges--- many of us have little gadgets that let us slit film for our cameras (ranging from homebrew to the cheap ZipSlits to the nice but expensive Acmel/Minox slitters).

The problem could be your scanner software.

 

I've been using a 4000 dpi film scanner (Nikon Coolscan 4000ED) to scan b&w minox films

(mostly APX 25 developed in Emofin). At first I had very poor results using the Nikon

software. After some research I found that the problem is that the software is designed for

colour negatives and assumes a masked negative even for b&w. I then switched to vuescan

(from www.hamrick.com) which seems to be able to get a lot more out of the negatives -

even badly under or over exposed negatives.

 

I haven't had problems applying unsharp masks, but have generally used only very small

amounts of sharpening, if any.

 

-Anthony

I use Canon FS4000 film scanner to scan Minox negative at 4000 dpi,

for now I use the Photoshop LE software bundled with the scanner, the results are ok for me.

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<img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/2424238-md.jpg"border=3><P>

<img src="http://www.photo.net/bboard/image.tcl?bboard_upload_id=18263084"border=3><P>

 

<P> Camera: Minox C<P>

Film: Kodak Techincal Pan<P>

Developer: 1+100 Rodinal<P>

Scanner: Canon Fs4000.<p>

Anthony, Martin,

 

How do you scan 8x11 negs with either the Nikon Coolscan or the CanoScan FS4000? I've

looked at both those models and been put off, precisely because they don't 'do' submini.

 

Have you rigged some kind of adapter? I'd love to learn more. Thanks -- Angus

It is easy to make a Minox 8x11 mask( or Edixa 16) mask for Canonscan FS4000 (or other brands), using a piece of paper (about the thickness of three copy paper) see diagram:

 

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<P><P>Mask for Minox 8x11 negative<P>

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