Quality of negative scanners?

[bjscharp]

Nikon Coolscan V ED here. Unless you plan to do extreme crops, everything to 400 ASA will be perfectly useable.

 

400 ASA at full resolution will look a bit grainy, but so will an enlargement from the same negative.

 

I've had great experiences with Kodak 200 HD film, myself.

 

On the whole, if you're dedicated to film, any of the Nikon scanners is well worth the investment.

[Ed_Ingold]

Stuart said, "Edward, can you recommend some places where you can send negatives to get truly high quality professional scans?"

 

Considering the effort I find necessary to get good negative scans, I doubt you could expect much from a commercial institution at a reasonable price. Reversal film is another matter. Scanning reversal film is straightforward with a calibrated scanner and CMS-compliant software (e.g., Silverfast), but negative film remains highly subjective.

 

You would find it more satisfying and economical to buy and use a scanner yourself.

 

The main advantage of the LS-5000 over the LS-50 (V) is the ability to use automatic slide and roll feeding attachments. This is a great time-saver. With an older (slower) LS-4000, it takes about 2 hours (or less) to scan a 36-38 exposure roll of 35mm film with the feeder, but 4-6 hours if you are limited to 6 frame strips. AFIK the image quality is identical - perhaps Les or others could comment in this regard.

[frameofmindphotography]

-Save your money, time, and effort. Go digital. If you are ending up scanning everything you shoot anyway.....

[kelly_flanigan1]

Scanning is like buying your first shovel. You can dig your own flowers; foundation for a new house; a boat slip; the Panama canal<BR><BR>. Like scanners shovels also emit a gas that blinds the new user. This gas makes them believe shovels and scanners require little time; and that weeks worth of work will be instant.<BR><BR> Part of justifying the purchase of a scanner is ignoring the time involved with transforming thousands; tens of thousands of images into the digital domain.<BR><BR> Typical buyers of scanners quickly reduce the amount of scanning once the time warp honeymoon phase wears off. One can shoot a roll of 36exp in six seconds with a motor drive and spend an hour or two to scan the damn stuff.<BR><BR> Scanners might be fun if in jail; or a desert island; or if you scan custom high end stuff. With massive scanning the time sink hole of scanning dozens of rolls takes its toll in time. Many times one can buy tools such as scanners cheap after the honeymoon phase; due to some folks have a life; or have to work.<BR><BR><b> Folks still under the gas must attack the more practical dlsr route; since the film scan times are debunked as trivial.</b><BR><BR> If you plan on a scanner route for 35mm get a real film scanner; not a flatbed. get one that will bulk feed and scan quickly. At some point the excitement of scanning wears off. <BR><BR>At first the excitement of digging a ditch a football field long is real; you have a single shovel; your time is worthless; it doesnt matter if you have no life; you are saving massive money by not using a ditchwitch; ie modern tools. In practical terms here I shot a total eclipse of the moon with kodachrome in the 1970's; I shot about 2 dozen 36exp rolls. Transforming this into the digital domain is still ongoing; each slide has to be cleaned; custom scanned.<BR><BR>In scanning "stuff" for the general Joe and Jane Public their input are not perfect; they are often a shoe box of crap; slides spilling out of boxes; all mixed up; faded; moldy; dusty; covered with cig. smoke. One can spend twice the time cleaning; vacuuming of the crap than scanning. Folks still under koolaid/gas think their "stuff" is perfect' when its often toxic crud that fouls the scanner; slides with mold growing on them.

[scott_turner]

Stuart,

 

Based on your comments, expectations and experience, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. What you're expecting just isn't IN the medium you're dealing with.

 

Here's the bottom line. For real world shots, a good quality 4000dpi film scanner gets everything there is to get from 35mm film (everything that counts, that is - you can always scan more detailed grain down to microscopic levels and get more bits in the file, but there's just no point to it). Fine detail in digitally shot images simply ENDS where-ever the anti-aliasing filter ends it. Fine detail in film fades slowly into the matrix of grain/dye clouds. If you don't get grain in the scan, you're not getting all the detail. If you want more (eg, more detail with less grain - higher signal/noise), and you don't want to go digital, your only choice is going to be medium format.

 

Of course, most would consider MF severe overkill for screen display. Screen display at any reasonable size just isn't a particularly demanding use for well scanned film, and any 35mm image (at least any ISO 400 or less) should appear crisp, sharp and grain free at any rational screen size, if properly processed.

 

Given your dissatisfaction with what you're seeing, my suggestion to you is to try it for yourself, and see what YOU can get. Go to a reputable pro lab that still offers drum scanning, and have one of your images scanned. Of course, you'd be best served to start with slow transparency film, as it's ISO for ISO finer grained to begin with, and most drum scanning operations are tuned for transparency films not negatives. I'd recommend West Coast Imaging in CA. See their scanning web page at: http://www.westcoastimaging.com/wci/page/services/scan/scanning.htm

 

A good drum scan at the resolutions you seem to feel you need will cost you about $25-$50 or so depending on lab, but it'll give you something to play with, and answer most of your questions once and for all.

 

One final thought, and then I'm oughta here... You've already made some assumptions based on what you see in Les' full-res scans. I've been scanning and post-processing scanned film for years and, your PS experience notwithstanding, I'm afraid those assumptions are a bit off. People always over-react to the noise/grain of 100% views of scanned film. Some never get past dealing with it differently, and move quietly to digital where the PP task is far easier. Processing film scans IS different, and will require some time to master in order to pull out all that's there.

 

In particular, you're going to need to re-think grain. It's always going to be there, but it's not as problematic as you seem to think. For fine-grained film at screen resolutions, you're going to need to think less about reducing it (though there are some good techniques for selective grain reduction with minimal impact on detail) and more about not emphasizing it in post (think masking, selective sharpening...). I typically do NO grain reduction on 35mm ISO 100 film scans, and get no visible grain on 13x19 prints. Screen sizes are easy by comparison.

 

You're also going to need to think about proper down-sampling to screen size. With clean digital images, you can literally get away with just about anything, but with large film scans with both fine detail AND noise/grain, you can't get away with anything. Every digital shooter's favorite of "bicubic-sharper" is a disaster, leaving you with a 'scrunchy' looking mess. Heck, any form of bicubic is a disaster.

 

Good luck,

 

Scott

[glyn r]

If you have Nikon Lenses buy a Nikon D300 and save yourself lots of hassle and time. I used a dedicated slide scanner and a Minolta 700si for several years. I eventually got tired of the the scanning hassle and now have a Sony Alpha. I should have done this years ago.

[robert lee]

"Does the ISO speed of my film have a large impact on scan quality of the negatives?"

 

Sure. Just look at the film data sheet. Look for the 50% point on the MTF curve. This gives a good idea of what resolution the specific film is capable of recording. In fact, it's enlightening to survey a broad spectrum of films. You'll see why an honest 4000dpi is about all you'll need from a scanner.

 

Think of the scanner as the modern equivalent of the wet darkroom enlarger. There's no magic there. The best equipment only means only less degradation relative to the source image. The limitation really is the film itself, and there's not a whole lot of reason to use the 135 format today.

[ned1]

Go film IF you are skilled or want to take the time to be skilled at color correcting the results. Even scanned, film has a wider color gamut and exposure latitude, and if done right can provide spectacular images.

 

I'm a trained color darkroom printer and I still have trouble nailing the colors in post-processing.

[arie07]

Been there and done that....the short answer is: Do not go the 35mm + scanner way. You'll spend more money and waaaaayyyy much more time getting decent results when compared with a medium priced DSLR (I would be thinking of the Pentax K20D with the II - New generation lens).

Now - If you are looking to print 20" or more inch photos and you do not have 40k under your mattress, you may get a decent MF camera and an Epson V500 scanner coupled with Vuescan software. A 645 neg will get you up to 25" prints and a 6x7 wil almost double the size and quality.

Now if you are just looking to display your photos on a PC screen... pick a P&S Digital. Anything will do the trick.

[radfordneal]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here's a link to a 11.7 Megapixel image derived from a scan of ISO 200 film with a Coolscan V:<P>

 

<A HREF="http://picasaweb.google.com/radfordneal/35mmFilm2008/photo#5201554993860893282">Scanned film image</A>. Click the magnifying glass (and wait) to see at full resolution.<P>

 

I think this is comparable to a DSLR image. Now, to reduce the grain in this, I used Neat Image, which can produce a much more DSLR-like image than the raw scan. (Whether reducing the grain in this way is actually desirable is a matter for subjective assessment.) I think many comparisons of film versus digital are comparing apples and oranges, since the digital images are always digitally processed, but the film images may not be. If you want a DSLR-like image from film, you need to do DSLR-like processing.<P>

 

Some details: This was taken with Black's ISO 200 colour negative film (probably rebranded Fuji), a Minolta SRT-201, an MC Rokkor 85mm 1:1.7 lens, and bounced and off-camera flash.<P>

 

By the way, the unsharp images you saw from a Digital Rebel were probably unsharp for reasons other than its sensor resolution. An 8 Megapixel DSRL image isn't really 8 Megapixels, because of the Bayer array interpolation, but it should certainly be much better than 1 Megapixel, if other things are all fine (which often they aren't, of course).

[kip_peterson]

This thread has really gotten some attention! I've enjoyed reading it.

 

I am an unabashed analog photography fan, even though I own a digital SLR, among

many cameras. I prefer shooting film for its look, and so I went on a scanner hunt to

try to get the best of both worlds. In my journey I learned consumer film scanners

just don't cut it for image quality. I've shared the following example with many

friends and photographers, and I think it is quite revealing. Just <a

href="http://web.mac.com/kip/iWeb/scans">click here</a>.

 

There is another link on this page that shows the advantages of not only the Scitex

EverSmart Pro II scanner I chose over consumer level scanners, but also the

advantages of fluid mounting which I now do routinely.

[stuart_henry]

Marco, thanks for making that page on scanning resolution. What you say makes sense to me if you do not plan to do any digital post processing. However, if you are doing digital post processing then I think it may be better to scan a bit more into the grain and then remove the grain digitally. Of course, I can't quantify this without having a scanner to play around with.

 

I can see from your chart that ISO film speed does have a very significant effect on grain size...just going from ISO 100 to ISO 200 loses 1/3 of the information. Since I don't have much experience shooting film I will have to research this aspect separately...I can see how

 

ISO 100 film would be fine for daytime shooting of static scenes outside, but I'm not sure that it would work well for example...for shooting moving animals, or from a moving vehicle, or in low light conditions. Since I will only have 1 camera, I will have to determine the best compromise ahead of time.

 

Les Sarile, you have mentioned that ICE is pretty important...yet looking at your comparison shot, it appears to me that Normal ICE is barely perceptible difference, and Fine ICE is significantly worse than No ICE. Neat Image, on the other hand, looks like a significant improvement -- but this is a photoshop plugin, so it doesn't effect scanner choice.

 

I have made a little test of my own. I found a 4x5" print and scanned it in on my crappy old flatbed scanner. I cannot compare it exactly to what I've been seeing on here, but the quality is definitely better than the lower end film scanners...and looks comparable to the higher end film scanners to me. Since I cant afford a high end scanner, and its easy to get prints developed, and easy to look at them before I scan, and easy to scan...I'm pretty convinced now that's the option I should take.

 

Scott, you say that bicubic sharper is a disaser for down sampling when you have grain. If you do a median filter first than it gets rid of the bad noise that messes up a bicubic sharper filter, and since you're downscaling it you don't really lose anything geometrically from doing it. Do you have a better option?

[radfordneal]

ICE is for removing spots due to dust, etc. If you don't have any dust, then ICE is at best going to do nothing (and maybe makes things slightly worse). Of course, you probably do have dust...

[radfordneal]

<I>I have made a little test of my own. I found a 4x5" print and scanned it in on my crappy old flatbed scanner.</I><P>

 

The results of this may depend a lot on how this print was made. If it was an optical print, there might be a lot of information there. If it was made recently in a consumer photo lab, however, it was certainly done by scanning the negative and then printing digitally. Very likely, they scanned at no more than 300dpi in terms of the print size, for a resolution of 1200x1500, or 1.8 Megapixels. If so, no scanner is going to get more than 1.8 Megapixels of actual information out of the print.

[Ed_Ingold]

Scanning prints is an option if you don't have the original film, which is often the case for family albums. However the dynamic range on paper is extremely limited (2.5 stops) compared to film, and the resolution subject to many common faults. Minilab prints are in fact digital, printed at about 300 ppi.

 

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of film choices, each with it's own fan club. The solution is to settle on two or three emulsions and learn how to work with them, rather than jumping on the latest rave. It's especially bad to look for bargain or outdated film - not that it's bad, rather that you can't get enough of it to work out the details. So choose a film you can get consistently and, if necessary, in quantity.

 

The contrast and color of negative film is subjective. However, you can nearly always get good color balance and any contrast and saturation that you want in a scan. Besides availability and reliability, the most important consideration is grain, especially with 35mm film.

 

I use Fuji Reala (100) with a tripod for landscapes and closeups for it's fine grain, and Fuji NPH400 for hand-held and flash shots, for its acceptible grain and easy to attain flesh tones. The third emulsion is Tri-X or TMax 100, because B&W is a lot of fun and easy to process. Your taste may vary, but you get the idea - simplify and explore in depth.

 

No post-scan plugin can work as well as ICE. ICE, as implemented by Nikon, uses a 4th, infrared light to differentiate between objects in the image from dust or dirt. The dyes in most film are relatively transparent to IR, but dirt is opaque. ICE-Normal has only a slight effect on sharpness, especially compared to ICE-Fine (which I never use).

 

I have both an LS-4000 and LS-8000. I find ICE is much more effective with the latter, due to its shallow DOF and softer light source. It is still necessary to do a touch-up using the healing tool (clone tool for tough cases) in Photoshop, which takes but a few minutes (<10).

[scott_turner]

Stuart,

 

Think logically about your strategy for scanning a print for a moment, and I believe you'll see the flaws. A print is a compromised second generation copy, and a copy of a copy can never approach working with the original. To make matters worse, as others point out, if it's a mini-lab print, it's printed digitally from a very mediocre scan itself to begin with. The dynamic range of the original is long gone, detail has been thrown away, and the color gamut has been significantly reduced.

 

Again, you seem to be drawing some provably erroneous conclusions based on no direct experience. If you're forced by finances into taking a compromise approach well, hey - you do what you have to do. But don't kid yourself as to the results you'll get.

 

Compared to well-made scans of the original film, scans from even good prints will look flat, one-dimensional and muddy. It's a strategy of last resort at best - something which would become painfully obvious to you once you actually started developing scanning & film post-processing skills. Painfully obvious

 

As for down-sampling, I'd commend to you this article by Bart van der Wolf: http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvdwolf/main/foto/down_sample/down_sample.htm The big potential problem in down-sampling anything with high spatial frequency detail (whether desired or undesired) is aliasing. Yes, some sort of low-pass pre-filtering is required - the question is what kind and just as importantly, how much? Too much, and your down-sampled image is too smooth, too little, and it gets unpleasantly scrunchy. But the filtering method used in the down-sampling itself is also critical, and even with appropriate pre-filtering, bicubic does not distinguish itself. Over time, I've found I generally prefer Lanczos, and I also get best results using a package with a built-in pre anti-aliasing filter.

 

As for grain reduction, I'll repeat my recommendation that, if PROPERLY TREATED, for almost any purpose, grain in ISO 100 level films is a non-issue. Don't over-react to 100% views of scans. If you didn't see the grain, you wouldn't have the details. You seem to want scans to look like digital images. Not only can you not expect 100% scan crops to look like digitally sourced images, YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO! If that IS what you want, then the answer really is to save yourself time and money, and go the fully digital route. Honestly.

 

For higher ISO films, I'd recommend one of the better profile-based noise reduction packages. I've used Neat Image for years, and with experience, it CAN do a very good job if used carefully, particularly in combination with masking, and/or the history brush. Use globally and with default values, however, it easily creates Plasticville images. Lately, I've been moving from Neat Image to Noiseware Pro, another profile-based package. While the results possible are similar, Noiseware seems to be a bit easier/faster to get to quality results. Again, it's best used in its PS-plugin form rather than standalone, for flexibility in masking and selective reductions.

 

Again, good luck to you.

 

Scott

[stuart_henry]

Les Sarile,

 

First of all, yes -- there is an overwhelming amount of information here :) But I'm doing my best to take it all in.

 

My comment about ICE was with respect to this image here:

http://www.fototime.com/4BA7AABC5FD205A/orig.jpg

 

The scratches are removed, but at the expense of making the whole thing a lot blurrier. Those scratches could have been removed in other ways without making it so blurry.

 

In your latest image of the black woman, the ICE does clearly remove dust and scratches -- but the image is too small to see how much blurriness it might be adding. Also, since

you have not compared it directly to digital techniques for removing the dust and scratches, I can't say that it's any better than digital techniques.

 

Edward says that "No post-scan plugin can work as well as ICE. ICE, as implemented by Nikon, uses a 4th, infrared light to differentiate between objects in the image from dust or dirt."

It may be true that ICE has additional information that is not available for digital post processing, and that theoretically gives it an advantage over digital post processing. It doesn't mean that it DOES perform better than any digital post processing..

 

It may be the case that a smart post processing algorithm can still manage to do a better job. Also, you have not considered that in post processing you have human intervention -- and a human can probably identify a scratch as well or better than ICE can. This gives an advantage to post processing that ICE doesn't have, because then you can use image inpainting techniques in small localized areas that are directed by a person.

 

I don't see any improvement through GEM in the crayon picture. The Grain Surgery does look like an improvement. I think your image intending to show NeatImage was mis-linked.

 

The image that I tested scanning in was probably produced optically, not digitally. That's what I would expect to have done again, if making prints. You guys sound very incredulous that this method would actually look good. It makes sense to me, though -- the limiting factor seems to be in the digital scanners, so by blowing it up optically first, it allows the scanners to do better. Yes, there's probably a loss of dynamic range from print -- but dynamic range is insignificant compared to spatial quality, which is much less perceptible and can be compensated for by playing around with contrast etc.

 

Have a look for yourself, and tell me if you don't think it looks better than a lot of the digitally scanned negatives...

 

Small:

http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/9441/lapsmvj9.jpg

 

Full size:

http://www.mediafire.com/?dxoijluzopn

[scott_turner]

<p><i>"You guys sound very incredulous that this method would actually look good. It makes sense to me, though -- the limiting factor seems to be in the digital scanners, so by blowing it up optically first, it allows the scanners to do better."</i></p>

 

<p>It's not a matter of being incredulous. What you're suggesting is both logically and provably fallacious.</p>

 

<p>In any case, no, the limiting factor is NOT in the scanner, it's in the film to begin with. What's bothering you in looking at full-rez film scans is the fact that they really are what the film looks like at those magnifications. What you're doing now appeals to you because the process of printing has already done the post-processing work for you. You're seeing the finished product as opposed to a blow up of the negative as you see in the raw negative scans you're viewing. You're simply making a second generation copy of that finished product which reflects all of that work - unfortunately both the positives and the negatives.</p>

 

<p>Give me the negative that print was made from originally and allow me to scan it, process it and make a print of the same size, and it'd absolutely blow your example out of the water for color, sharpness, detail, contrast and 3-dimensionality. This is the point several of us having been trying to make to you for some time now. The thing you're missing is that the full size scans you see ARE BLOWN UP, ACCURATE REFLECTIONS OF THE ORIGINAL NEGATIVE, warts and all, and that's the best place to start. It's the same thing that your print (which you then copied) started from. If that print had started from your scan, it wouldn't have looked nearly as good, (and, of course, neither would a scan of that subsequent print). That's the critical element. No one looks at 22Mpixel 100% crops, except to pixel peep. You'd have to look at a well-made print made from an original scan and compare it to your print in order to see the differences.</p>

 

<p><i>"Have a look for yourself, and tell me if you don't think it looks better than a lot of the digitally scanned negatives..."</i></p>

 

<p>Frankly, no, I don't. It's a nice image, BTW, but in technical terms, your digitized version is soft, lacking in fine detail, flat, and tonally blocked up. If I were to take one of Les' better images, for example, properly process it and print it, and then compare it, well...</p>

 

<p>Look, I'm not trying to run down what you're doing here. If it works for you, and produces results that are easy for you to get and are acceptable to you, then you've got what you need. But there are far, far better ways of working if you're looking for top quality.</p>

 

<p>Scott</p>

[stuart_henry]

Les Sarile,

 

The ICE does look a lot better on the African woman. I think that the reason it works on this picture and not on the map photo is because the image is blown up beyond the detail level of the original film grain, whereas the resolution of the scratches is not limited by film grain -- so a small amount of additional gaussian blur caused by the ICE is imperceptible and does not lose any true image information. This is not the case in the map photo, where the highest frequencies in the image content are similar to the frequency of the scratches...probably because you photographed it in such a controlled environment with perfect focus and perhaps lower ISO film. For this reason, I can see that ICE would be a very desirable property when scanning higher ISO film.

 

The GEM is much more pronounced in this harbour shot..I see the difference in the crayola picture now, too..although it is less pronounced because it doesn't have such high contrast salty noise as the harbor one does in the sky.

 

I would disagree when you say that the GEM is hardly significant at screen resolution but effective at 100% resolution. I think it is a pretty significant improvement at screen resolution, and LESS important when viewing at 100% resolution...at full resolution, the noise tends to blend into the image more naturally but its very obvious when you zoom out.

 

Indeed, I cannot do a controlled comparison of a digital-scan-from-optical-print to digital-scan-from-negative without having a digital negative scanner...but there is such a big change in quality level, that I think I can safely say it's probably worse than the CoolScan but still blows the Epson V500 completely out of the water. This is a comparison you could surely do, though. Just make sure that you are using a print that was produced optically so there's no controversy there.

 

"I would guess that the reduction from the original is perhaps as much as a GEM setting of 4?" I'm not quite sure what you're asking, and I don't actually know what GEM is, but I didn't use it. My particular scanner (Mikrotek ScanMaker 4700) is of very low quality, and it always adds a very obtrusive color gaussian noise to anything I scan. The actual print is so much better than this...there is no perceptible grain at all in the print, and contains a lot more detail than my scanner captured. In order to get rid of that terrible noise I used a median2 filter and then I just adjusted the levels a bit.

 

Here was the raw scan output:

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/5337/postue5.jpg

[stuart_henry]

"In any case, no, the limiting factor is NOT in the scanner, it's in the film to begin with. What's bothering you in looking at full-rez film scans is the fact that they really are what the film looks like at those magnifications."

 

Scott, you have just misunderstood me. I understand that the information content of the film presents an upper limit on the quality that can theoretically be achieved.

 

I do not require images with greater detail than is theoretically attainable with 35mm film. I think I've already said that. My problem is that I cannot afford a digital scanner like the Coolscan that allows the full amount of information to be extracted from a 35mm film. As you can see in Sariles comparison here,

 

http://www.fototime.com/037129A6767519B/orig.jpg

 

Using a cheaper scanner like the Epson doesn't even come remotely close to getting the full information out...and that doesn't just mean its good for small prints, because honestly this scan is so terrible...I think the effects would be visible even if you shrunk it down 10x.

 

So, the limiting factor is indeed scanner quality *for me* for price reasons, not for theoretical reasons.

[stuart_henry]

The median filter thing was just a quick hack...I will probably cook up some custom software specifically designed to remove this kind of noise from my scans, if I use that option.

 

But I have another question...does B&W film of equal ISO have less grain than color film?

[kip_peterson]

Les Sarile--I look forward to your e-mail. The thread continues to focus on consumer-

grade scanners which, as I've posted in my example link above, are remarkably inferior

to professional-level scanners. Once you've seen this difference, the debate seems to

fade away--at least for me!

 

Take care--

 

Kip

[robert lee]

"I do not require images with greater detail than is theoretically attainable with 35mm film. ... I cannot afford a digital scanner like the Coolscan that allows the full amount of information to be extracted from a 35mm film."

 

A really nice option is to use larger format film. A cheap, film capable consumer flatbed has half the linear resolution of the Nikon. However, a frame of 6x7 MF is roughly double that of 35mm on a side. The flatbed/MF scans are at least the equal of, and almost always superior to that from the Nikon/35mm film combination.

 

For a real example, look a the flower and vase crops near the end of this thread: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00MkgS

 

Keep in mind that the price of film MF equipment has depreciated to almost nothing. For the amateur (and basically anyone not under time and production pressures) it doesn't get any better than this.

[Ed_Ingold]

Stuart,

 

It's a little frustrating when an newbie argues authoritatively based on one thing he's read as opposed to another. I refer specifically to your opinions on Digital ICE, but there are other things as well. Until you have used a film scanner to the extent Les and I have, I suggest you listen a little more carefully. I'll shut up now and let you get to work while you still know everything.

[stuart_henry]

Les Sarile, I didn't take the photograph so I'm not totally sure (actually, the baby is me). It's a 3.5"x5.5" print on Fujicolor Crystal Archive photographic paper...so now that I think about it, it was probably a digital print made from an old slide that came from a 35mm film camera.

 

Why would slides by finer than negatives in terms of grain? Aren't the slides made from negatives? Thanks for the comparison of B&W ISO's. I'm still not clear though, does B&W film contain less grain than equal ISO color film? The reasons I ask is because I thought color film might have to use different types of phosphorus or something, sort of like a TV screen, where you sacrifice spatial resolution for color depth.