stuart_henry

And one other remark: If you want the quality of 100 ISO film and still be able to shoot at low light conditions, why not consider a fast, fixed focal length, prime lens as an addition to any other lenses you may want to carry?

 

Indeed, that was my conclusion too. I also wanted a fixed zoom lens so that it would protrude less and be more rugged. I've purchased a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D...it just arrived in the mail today :) Thank you for your suggestion about the film -- I will definitely give it a shot! It looks like this may be a pretty good compromise all around.

 

Yeah, I suppose you could have some nice grainy shots...but I've never been touching up a shot and thought to myself, "gee...if only I had some more film grain." Of course, it's always possible to add grain, but you can never take it away.

Robert, yeah..medium format film looks pretty cool. I've never done that before but it's something I may check out in the future. I don't think its a practical option for this trip, though, because I need something small that I can just throw around my neck and go hiking around with without being a burden.

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.

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?

"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.

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

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

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?

Scott, I wanted to see 100% resolution views because that's what I'm going to be dealing with if I buy the thing. Looking at a down sampled image, I don't know what kind of information was lost (or not lost) during the down sampling process. The pictures you linked were a bit small for on-screen viewing.

 

The images that Sarile linked were (in my opinion) just barely good enough for on screen viewing purposes. Yes, they are 3600x5500 raw...but I would end up doing a lot of post effects to hide the effects of grain...bilateral filter, maybe a median filter...then down sample it to a much smaller size to get a crisp image. If my raw scan was already 2000 pixels, then I'd be playing with thumbnails.

Les Sarile,

 

Nice..thanks for that excellent comparison! The Coolscan 5000 scans are about on-par with the quality I'm looking for in my general purpose shots. It's out of my price range right now, and I guess that means I can stop bothering to look at the lower end scanners. I'll just have to get all my film scanned professionally until I can afford a scanner of adequate quality.

Does the ISO speed of my film have a large impact on scan quality of the negatives? I know that faster film is going to be more granular by nature, but I'm not sure if the effect is compounded during the scanning process. I was planning on using 500 ISO film.

 

Brooks, 99% of my pictures will be viewed in digital format on the computer screen. I would probably be happy with just 4 MP of information content -- by that I mean, the amount of sharpness you would expect from taking a 100 MP image and downsampling it to 4 MP in Photoshop, so there is no blurriness.

 

For some of my favorite pictures, I may want to make prints -- probably just 8x10. For those I would probably have it sent somewhere to be scanned professionally.

 

Edward, you mention that all pixels are not equal..and I already know what you mean. I was given a bunch of RAW files from my friends DSLR Rebel taken at 8 MP...but I don't believe they really had more than 1 MP of actual "information content."

 

It is disappointing to hear that equal MP from a negative scan are worse than DSLR of the same resolution -- but I guess that's just a fact I will have to live with. This discussion makes me want to consider medium format film cameras in the future...but not for this trip.

 

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

One more thing...

 

Another option for me is to get slides, so I can inspect them and see which ones I like, and then send the good ones off to be professionally scanned. This would make sense for me if the quality of a professional scanner is going to be much higher megapixel/quality than what I could do by myself.

Thanks so much for all your prompt feedback! I certainly wasn't expecting to get so much good advice so soon.

 

Scott, those images on your website look decent..but they are only 0.6 MP...so I'm guessing you have down sized from the digital scan considerably. What I'd like to see is a raw image of the scan output...so I can see how much total resolution it has, see how much work would need to be done in Photoshop to clean it up etc. As I said I am no stranger to Photoshop so that's not a problem for me.

 

Louis, how does the quality of that 14 MP film scan to the output of a 14 MP DSLR? I haven't owned a DSLR but my friend gave me a bunch of raw files from her Rebel (I think it was 8 MP but not sure) and I was pretty shocked/disappointed to find that the "effective" resolution was much smaller...they felt more like 1 MP images that had been scaled up.

 

What is the physical difference between a "flatbed" and "dedicated" film scanner?

 

Don't bother trying to persuade me into a DSLR...I have so many reasons not to go down that route. For one thing, my primary impetus for getting a camera is for my upcoming 1 month trip into the African bush where there will be no electricity. I can't afford a good DSLR and if I could, I wouln't want to carry around some big expensive fragile thing anyway. Digital cameras stink...I don't want to lose photo opportunities because my camera has to be "turned on" first, or couldn't pull the trigger fast enough..or ran out of batteries...or pictures werent as good because it needed a longer exposure time. I just want cheap, simple, lightweight, reliable, sharp film camera. It doesn't matter that my intended medium is a digital file -- I still think its better to make the conversion to digital in the lab rather than in the field.

I just got a Nikon N65 and I'm looking for a cheap practical solution for

developing the film. It seems from my research online that scanning negatives

or slides are good options. People seem to say that scanning negatives gives

better results but it may be more difficult to get the color right, etc. I

don't mind having to adjust the color, I just want good resolution with no grain

or blurring. My question is, how good is the quality I can expect from a home

film negative scanner?

 

Just as a reference point, I looked at this scanner...which scans at 4800 x 9600 dpi

http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/productDetail.do?oid=184510&WT.mc_n=4&WT.mc_t=U&cm_ven=COMPARISON%20SHOPPING&cm_cat=GOOGLE&cm_pla=DATAFEED-%3EPRODUCTS&cm_ite=1%20PRODUCT&cm_keycode=4

 

To scan a 35mm area, this would produce a 6614x13229 image...which is 87 MP.

That doesn't sound right...!

 

Ive been browsing around trying to find images that other people have produced

to get a sense of the quality. Some of them have weird artifacts and distorted

colors...others are crisp and look better...