Scan Quality....?

[mark_grow1]

I'm trying to tie our film into our wedding workflow. Recently we

had a roll of film scanned during processing for evaluation. This is

a 30mb Frontier scan done of a 120 negative.

 

Question: Is this a bad scan, or is this as good as it gets...?

 

Mark

[berg_na]

You indicate that the samples are both "300% cropped", what does that mean? The scanned image must be much larger than the APS-size D70 image, so if it were resized to match the D70 image, it should be very sharp and free of noise and film grain artifacts. In the end, I suspect that the drum scanned image will yield much better large prints than the 6Mp digital image.

[ilkka_nissila]

It's difficult to get good scans from color negative film. I always have to run NeatImage or GEM to get there. I used LS-4000 (35 mm model) for the scans and typically the outcome was quite grainy compared with analog prints. For color neg work, I would recommend traditional darkroom printing. Nikon's newer models (LS-9000 for 120) have improved software for negative scanning so maybe it's a software issue mainly. Have you tried Kodak Pro PhotoCD? That used to give very good results from color neg film. And remember: if you scan color negative, avoid at all costs underexposing it!

[edgar_njari]

The trouble with scanning is that by using lower resolution you don't eliminate the grain.

So if the size of grain is such that it can be sampled at 4000dpi,

it will still show at 2000dpi because of grain aliasing. But at 2000dpi it will not be actual grain as it is on the film, but a rough image of grain or "noise" produced by grain. That happens when grain is smaller than one pixel, or is around one pixel in size.

 

So allthough it might seem like a paradox, using the higher resolution than Frontier resolution would produce less grain, and

the grain would be a bit smother.

Allso frontier produces sick amounts of sharpening that sticks out

noise and grain so much that you have to soften the image when you get home instead of sharpening it. So any small noise or grain in a frontier will turn out rather obvious.

 

Don't compare MF film (or any other format) with a digital camera by using a frontier scan. It will tell you nothing. It is about 3200dpi (don't know how much for MF) and has grain aliasing and boosts it too much with sharpening.

 

Frontier scans may (or may not) be good for making some prints, but

they are for sure not good enough for studying grain and comparing to first generation images from a DSLR.

It's not that the scan itself is so bad in frontier (captures much detail for its dpi resolution), it's the postprocessing that screws things up.

[fotografz]

Hi Mark. What size and dpi are these scans? 30 meg from a 6X6 neg is really small even if

they were 8 bit. A 4000 dpi of a 6X6 neg would yield about a 200+ meg scan. I scan 6X6

stuff at about 3000 dpi for making display prints to 20".

[jtk]

Looks like a terrible scan.

 

I think you should give Epson 4870 or 4990 a chance rather than believing what you read here. If it's your business you can figure out some way to do that. Even the 3200 will do better than what you've shown.