recommended lab in NYC for high resolution scans

[ryan_pasia]

Hello,

 

I have been reading Ken Rockwell's site lately and noted that he has been able to get 16MP scans of his slides from

NCPS. I'd love to get that kind of resolution out of my film; however, I live in New York City and do not know of a lab

that can do this locally.

 

Any recommendations? Thanks in advance!

[gregory_logiodice1]

Modernage (www.modernage.com) in midtown can do anything including a drum scan, which is the highest resolution and overall best quality scan available. It seems that NCPS is combining a low cost, high resolution scan (about 4000 dpi??) with slide processing, $0.33 (scan) per frame. This is a fantastic idea, imo... don't know of anyone else that does this yet.

[tibz]

35mm film only holds so much image data. A good Kodachrome 25 (doesn't exist anymore) slide held 20 mega-grains. Many films today are pitiful IMHO, especially print films (fingers crossed for Ektar 100).

 

You can photograph your slides with a digital camera and a slide duplication tube/macro lens which will give you whatever your camera has. This works and it's fast. You can use a scanner, which will give you 4000 dpi. That's 16mp for a 1x1 inch negative. The question becomes less how high a resolution you can scan at and more of a question of how much data there is in the film. There's no point scanning a 35mm negative at 300 megapixels because that data don't exist.

 

Essentially any 1 hour photo store has the equipment (maybe not the expertise) to produce good scans. Any photo store really. My school uses a Coolscan 4000 which is pretty good. If you REALLY like an image you can send it out to be drum scanned which will fetch all of the data possible from the film (maybe an exaggeration). But, if you're a Ken Rockwell devotee he also says that 35mm doesn't have enough image area to be practical in many forms of photography. Medium format gives you much more. 4x5s get hard to take. You can really see this when you enlarge optically. The data are not there.

[dorothy_beriss]

Try LTI, it's at 34 East 30th Street, New York, NY 10016, 212-685-6871

 

Also Ken Lieberman Lab, on Avenue of the Americas.

[laichungleung]

I use Alkit on 45th Street near 3rd Ave, it's on the 2nd floor. The turn around is a week, the actual lab is in New Jersey I think. It's about $9.75 per roll for C-41, develop, proof and scan. I think the develop and proof (5" x 5") are decent. The scan is I don't know I am not at all qualified to judge that professionally. The scan is done in JPEG, about 4 to 5 MB big or small, the dimension is 2610 x 2610 pixel when opened in GIMP it says (Background) 52.2MB, the scan kind of lacks details but it could just be me. I have not asked them what other scan options they can offer, I dare not to ask as I think most of the time, it's a matter of money how much you are willing to spend. And I don't know enough to ask the right question, like dpi or whatever that makes a scan a good scan that can blow up to like 10' x 10' or whatever.

 

The shop is not high brow or anything, very down to earth, and I don't feel intimidated walking in some artsy shop.

[ryan_pasia]

Hi all,

 

Thanks for all the responses! I also want to let everyone know that Richard Shute from NCPS emailed me pricing

and other details regarding their services. If you're interested, send me a PM and I will forward his email.