Scanners - Epson/Imacon Experience

[bill_wadman]

Hi everyone. Wanted to share a little experience I had..

 

I'm a portrait photographer and planning on entering a few shots of mine in a

competition. Both Portra 400NC shot on a hasselblad 500.

 

At home I've got an Epson 4990 Photo which I used to scan them originally. The

shadows looked more noisy that I expected them to and I was having a hard time

getting the color balance just right.

 

So I rented an hour on an Imacon 949 yesterday and rescanned them at about

6000x6000px. And I must say that while they are higher-res scans and are

superior to what I got at home, they're not THAT much better. The color is

better but I give more of that credit to the custom profiles for the film that

people had created on the machine. I didn't notice that much improvement in the

shadows (and yes I played around with the shadow depth slider).

 

This isn't a rip on the Imacon, it was certainly a better scan, I just wanted to

say that I expected it to be a night and day difference which it really wasn't.

I guess this says good things about the epson for about 2% of the price. ;-)

 

Anybody else have similar experiences?

 

-bill wadman

365portraits.com

[roger_smith4]

I wouldn't think that shadows on negative film would challenge the hardware of any scanner (negative film shadows are almost transparent). The grain/noise you see is what's on film.

 

If you were shooting transparencies or cared more about resolution the Imacon might be more impressive. If the Epson does the job- great!

[patricklavoie]

Bill, i agree with you about not a huge difference in color, but in term of sharpnes, the Imacon is wayyyyyyyy better. As for the shadow, in both case i always get better one from a Imacon, but not THAT better. If you want to scan a 35mm, nothing beat (i mean no epson as today) a Imacon scan for sure.

 

optic quality, sharpness..Imacon all the way. For many user, a Epson will do the job just fine.

[tedharris]

No surprise. Our tests of the Imacon show that, while it outperforms the consumer class

scanners it is not that much btter. It still falls far short od the high end flatbeds and drums.

[bill_wadman]

I'd like to add that I played with noise ninja on the scan today and ended up with a much more visually neutral noise in the shadows.

 

And Roger, you're right, I'm just surprised that there is that much noise in 400 iso 120 film. I guess I tend not to shoot high contrast stuff most of the time. ;-)

[Ed_Ingold]

If you haven't found out by now, scanning takes a great deal of skill. You can't expect to buy a better scanner and see miracles. You have to learn that scanner and, even more important, learn how to use any particular emulsion to its best advantage. Post-scan processing is one of the major skill factors.

 

Secondly, in a brief, largely anecdotal test, you often compare the best you've seen from one scanner with the results you get from another based on a very small sample size. It may not even be the scanner, rather the quality of the negative itself. At very least, pick a good negative and compare scans. It is still the aggregate of results that gives a more accurate comparision.

 

Other leveling factors include technique (e.g., tripod or not), exposure and composition. You won't see much difference in 8x10 inch printe, although it should be pretty obvious at 16x20 inches. Color balance is problematic with negative film. Your reference to a "custion profile" provided with the scanner betrays your inexperience. With negative film, you create a custom profile, if needed, for a particular task. You can't borrow one.

 

I see a pretty dramatic difference between a flatbed scanner (Epson 2450) and a Nikon LS-8000 in the course of a few thousand scans. From test reports, even the V750 barely reaches half the performance level of the Nikon. A factor of two is about the least change of any significance in the digital world, but it is still the difference between grain-sharp and wannabe sharp.

[roger_smith4]

Hey Bill, I think the advantage of 120 is just that the noise is enlarged less, not that it's less apparent. Give the film another stop of exposure and you should significantly cut shadow noise and not sacrifice the highlights at all.

 

I don't use 400NC but for 35mm 400UC this has been very helpful to improve the quality.

 

"With negative film, you create a custom profile, if needed, for a particular task. You can't borrow one. "

If the hardware is constant it should be possible to create simple starting point "profiles" (white point, black point, define neutral) for different film types.

If the C41 development is consistent from roll to roll then it should work reasonably well, or at least does for me on my home film scanner.

[bill_wadman]

Edward-

 

You're more than a little condescending in your comments, how about being a little nicer next time. ;-)

 

I'll be more specific:

I'm not an idiot or a newbie who's new to photography.. And I scanned 8 different frames on 4 different rolls of film, some portra 400, some portra 800, and some scala slide film, all with similar results. I understand that the quality of the negative matters and I was aware of any deficiencies in their focus/exposure while making the scans. I was also looking at 6000x6000 pixel scans at 100% on screen so print quality is not what I was looking at, although they will be printed when I'm done, probably 24x24".

 

As someone pointed out.. the shadow noise I thought was due to the epson scanner is most likely just grain in the film. But that means that the Epson did about as good as the Imacon in pulling the max detail out.

 

Also, as Roger mentioned, I used the labs profiles as a starting point to getting what I wanted. And I do believe their profiles were done by shooting color charts on different films and then sampling white/black/gray. So they should be a pretty darn good starting place to neutralize the orange in the film base. I then adjusted them to taste, and spent a fair amount of time in post when I got home.

 

Roger, thanks.. I just meant that the noise should appear smaller in medium format in relation to whatever you're shooting.. so a face in 35 might take up 1cm on the film, on 6x6 it might be 3 or 4cm and thus the grain on a persons face would appear smaller, assuming the grain is the same in the two films. Also, yes you're right about the overexposure. The shots I'm working with were a one shot chance to shoot a hero of mine, and the light was very contrasty (in from the window on one side) So I pushed it as far as I felt comfortable while not killing the highlights.

 

thanks everyone.

[roger_smith4]

"So a face in 35 might take up 1cm on the film, on 6x6 it might be 3 or 4cm and thus the grain on a persons face would appear smaller, assuming the grain is the same in the two films"

Makes sense.

 

"The shots I'm working with were a one shot chance to shoot a hero of mine, and the light was very contrasty (in from the window on one side) So I pushed it as far as I felt comfortable while not killing the highlights. "

 

For high contrast bright light I really would jack up the exposure to keep the shadows above the noise floor. I've yet to lose non-specular highlights because of overexposure with color negative film. You may lose contrast but it's easy to restore that with curves.