Quality of Lab Scans

[acearle]

I've been using a lab about 45 minutes away because they do very good

prints. However, I have been very disapointed with their film scanning

service. The results, no matter how much I tweak in Photoshop, are

nowhere near the quality of the prints. I have an HP scanner, 3300c,

if I recall, sitting in a storage room because of a driver problem.

What do you think, will the quality of the scanned prints exceed the

quality of the negative scans (see my portfolio for some examples).

I'm trying to decide if it is worth rebuilding my system to get the

flatbed scanner working.

[the_macman]

Ask them what exactly they're doing. Maybe they do a little tweaking of their

own to make sure it looks good on their monitor which is possibly calibrated in

a very different way from yours. If that's the problem you can ask them to scan

give you the scans as they are without any modifications, that way you'll still

have the lattitude to do your own modifications.

[neal_shields]

I had a drum scan done of a portion of a 4x5 velvia negative so I could get an idea of how much information I was leaving behind with my flat bed scanner at 1600dpi. The answer was a great deal.

 

However, I paid $300 for the flat bed scanner and $30 for a drum scan that was 1/2"x1/2".

 

However, a drum scanner uses a completely different technology (photo multiplyer tube) which has a greater density range. If you keep the resolution down to just what you need, they are more economical.

 

I was trying to see "how high is high" so I went full boat at 12000dpi.

[._._z]

<i> I've been using a lab about 45 minutes away because they do very good prints.

However, I have been very disapointed with their film scanning servic </i><p>

 

Most neighborhood labs either have low-end scanners in-house, or charge more for

4000dpi scans, or send negs out for scanning by a wholesale bureau (which may or

may not do a good job). <p>

 

You don't say what types of negative you are talking about. A good flatbed scanner

can do an acceptable job scanning medium format negs, but it won't do a good job

with smaller 35mm negatives.

[acearle]

Thanks for the responses. The negs are 35mm and the flatbed scanner will not do transparencies or negatives. I'm thinking about just scanning the prints (I'm that dissatisfied with the negative scans). I'll ask the lab to not do any post processing on the scans and see what happens.

[markus_ehrenfried]

I give my films to a lab which uses a Fuji Frontier. The quality of the prints was always extremely good. They offer a CD with jpegs for a small additional fee, so I always order it, but the quality of the scans is much lower than the quality of the prints. They claim that the jpegs on the CD are exactely the same files they used to produce the prints ("the Frontier machine just saves it to a CD"), which I somehow cannot belive... is there someone who was ever happy with the scans he ordered together with prints?

[acearle]

Yep, it is a Frontier. They say the negative scans are exactly what is printed. Oh well, I've figured out that reducing the final resolution to a maximum of 600 pixels wide or tall and doing a -20 on brightness and a +10 on contrast is about as close as it is going to get to the original print.