janne_moren

Mechanical cameras tend to get inexact over time. I measured a couple of well-working cameras of mine for fun last year (I'd cobbled together a shutter timing meter and was looking around for cameras to test it on), and every one of them was more or less off - easily by a stop or so at the extremes. I had never really noticed it of course, since negative film is really forgiving.

 

My guess is that you need to either have your shutter cleaned and adjusted, or you simply remember to overexpose by a stop or so for the speed range you used for those slide shots of yours.

<p>Meh. This is a hobby; as long as I'm within what I'm prepared to pay, cost is not a factor. My enjoyment is a factor, however, and I'm enjoying film (especially MF film) more than I do digital nowadays. As an aside, I seem to actually spend less money using film than digital in practice.</p>

<p>Just use whichever you find the more rewarding, and stop worrying about what other people think.</p>

<p>Dan, slide film is not a great comparison; it has lots of contrast, but it's actually not spectacular at resolving fine detail. If you really want fine detail, you probably need to use something like Fuji Acros 100. But then, the reality is that most of us just don't need to optimise for fine detail at all cost. Other aspects of the image are more important.</p>

<p>Well, it finds the range with a little help. :) Yes, it's a zone focus camera but it works well with an external rangefinder, or simply by guess-focusing. I assumed the OP was looking for "very compact rangefinder-style film camera" and it does fit the bill.</p>

<p>Turn off _all_ sharpening. Most scanning software has it on by default for some reason. That seems to be the reason for excessive grain more often than not.</p>

 

<p>The Rollei 35 does.</p>

 

<p>Trent, the resolution limit for V700 is a hardware limit, not software. It basically has two scanning heads, one of which (the 6400dpi one) will only scan 35mm (it only covers the 35mm holder area), while the other, general purpose head has a nominal 3200dpi. Of course that's the optical resolution; the practical result seem to be around 3500dpi and 2600dpi respectively. Which is good enough.</p>

<p>I use Vuescan and I have tried it of course, just to make sure: with 35mm there's a definite, clear difference between scanning 3200 and 6400, while MF at 6400 is just the 3200 scan scaled up. Of course you _could_ do some trickery like adapt a 35mm holder to scan one part of a larger frame at a time, then stitch them together afterwards. But really, even scanning 645 at a practical 2500dpi gives us more than enough resolution for just about any normal use already.</p>

 

<p>The V700 will do 645 nicely, as will the new V600. As they scan MF and above at lower resolution than 35mm (expect to get about 2600dpi or so when calibrated) you won't see much of a resolution increase of your scans compared to 35mm, but of course all other aspects of image quality are much improved. I use 6x7 myself, but not for the resolution increase.</p>

 

<p>Thomas, not all flourescents are created equally. They don't give you a whole spectrum, but only light at some frequencies. A light box flourescent is probably selected to give us a decently accurate representation of color, but the DSLR or scanner has sensor sensitivities different from ours, so the images may get a color cast even though they look correct on the light table to our eyes. The scanner avoids this by matching the fluorescent type and scanning sensor of course (as well as recalibrating itself on startup).</p>

<p>A screen is almost never neutral. "Pure white" isn't. Don't forget that the calibration is (or at least should be) made in relation to the ambient light in the room. That said, I doubt there'd be much visible color cast left if you manually tweak the color balance of the resulting images afterwards. Unless accurate color representation is important to you it's certainly worth a try.</p>

<p>Before this veers off too much, it's worth remembering what Kirk Tuck and others have been pointing out lately: for the vast majority of camera users (including professionals), for almost all of the time, any modern digital camera or film camera will give you all the resolution you need. Around 8-10mp is sufficient for all but really large printing, and is something all dslrs and film cameras can do with a good lens, low iso and good shooting practice. And of course most images today are never printed. They're used online in one way or another, and there 10mp is not only sufficient, it gives you lots and lots of margin for cropping, noise removal and so on. What medium and format to choose is mostly about other qualities (color fidelity, dynamic range, noise/grain, "feel" and so on).</p>

<p>Copying with a camera is perfectly fine; it will give you all the detail you need. After all, normal 1:1 macro lenses were originally meant for precise copying too. The issue is really mostly if it's a good way if you need to copy more than just a few images. For larger amounts of images a scanner is probably a faster and more reliable way to get consistent results.</p>

<p>Um, am I missing something here? The example above looks significantly better - I mean obvious even after a single glance, at the small sizes shown online - for the scanned image over the one shot with the camera, both before and after unsharp masking. That said, the example image is perhaps not that well chosen; the focus is at around infinity, and it's obviously a hot environment giving you a lot of heat blur so the original negative is unlikely to have all that much fine detail to begin with.</p>

 

<p>I'd be happy to use sane, actually, since I only want raw scans for further processing. Sane doesn't support the V500 and V700 unfortunately.</p>

 

<p>I use Vuescan and the Epson V700 under ubuntu. Works fine.</p>

<p>Vuescan is good at scanning, but pretty frustrating for anything else, so I just scan straight and save the resulting images at 16 bits per channel. Then I use UFraw to set black and white point, color balance adjustment, curves, scaling and cropping. Last I use Gimp for local edits (dust spotting, sharpening and so on). I have a preset for UFraw specifically for film scan edits (set color temperature to 6500 and green value to 1.0 to get the same color you got from Vuescan for instance).</p>

<p>One wrinkle is that while DNG output from Vuescan works fine for color images, it does something strange with black and white that UFraw is not reading correctly. So for black and white I use TIF file, 16 bit gray, no compression and no profile. UFraw reads that fine.</p>

 

<p>AFAIK, ASA and old ISO are the same. However, the method of rating film was changed a number of years ago, effectively rating films as faster than before. This was, I believe, in acknowledgement that films had gotten a lot better at recording shadow detail than earlier generations. So whether ASA or ISO, old films (really old by now) are rated differently than today's films.</p>

<p>Forget about a meter if you can. You narrow down your possible choices a lot, and most on-camera meters are not very good on older cameras. Instead, pick up a handheld incident meter. It's much more accurate to use, and you can meter just once for a given scene, set the camera and then forget about it until you change scene or the light changes appreciably.</p>

 

<p>I have the 67 with a 90mm and 45mm lens. The meter seems fine from my experience, but I mostly use an external meter and the waist-level finder. The bulk is not a problem for me (especially when I realized that the 67 and lenses weighs no more than my DSLR kit). Mirror lock-up is important from 1/30 or 1/60 seconds down to a second or so, though it of course depends on the film, your subject and your own tolerance for motion blur.</p>

<p>The film costs just the same to develop no matter what the format of course, but you'll get 10 exposures to the roll instead of 15, so the cost per image goes up accordingly. Shutter is whole steps only, and lenses are half stops. That is still accurate enough for any practical use (I believe the Mamiya 7 is the same?).</p>

<p>The 67 is a fun camera. You'll probably enjoy it. But do get the WLF if you can; it's cheap and very comfortable to use on a tripod.</p>

<p>No, I'm seriously asking you why?</p>

<p>You obviously have knowledge to share and you write it up well, but with half a dozen threads IN ALL CAPS posted at the same time, you come off as somebody in need of a higher dose of their psychiatric medication. Which, I assume, is nothing like the case.</p>

<p>WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING AT US?</p>

<p>Marc, I have the V700 (the Japanese named version) and I've never had any real problems with the supplied holders. As long as your film is relatively flat along the short edge (and there's several ways to make sure of that) there's no problem using them. They are height adjustable and it makes quite a lot of difference to the overall quality. I've never been tempted to get third-party holders.</p>

<p>If I were to buy a scanner today I would be rather tempted by the V600 to tell the truth. It seems to have the same nominal resolution as the V700 - in practice you get about 2500dpi with medium format, and 3600 with 35mm film - and it has an LED light source which I'd prefer over the flourescents in the V700. The drawback is that you can scan less in one go, and that makes a real difference in the speed of your workflow. But today I'd probably spring for the V600 and wait for Epson to come out with a real higher-end scanner for MF that could give the Nikon a run for its money.</p>

 

<p>It's impossible to generalize; lenses are so individual. But with that said, faster lenses tend to pay a penalty in overall image quality, whether resolution, vignetting, distortion or whatever. In other words, there's a _tendency_ that, say, an f/2.8 lens of a given focal length will be better quality at f/4 or f/5.6 than an f/1.8 lens. But that is given the same image format, same generation lens and the same overall design and production budget. For instance, the Pentax M f/1.7 lenses are better at just about any focal length than the f/1.4 ones. The A f/1.2 is however as good or better than either; it's a newer design and had a higher budget. The f/2.0 lenses in the same focal range are worse; they were the budget line, shipped as kit lenses for consumer cameras.</p>

<p>So, in principle you're right; in practice it completely depends on the individual lenses you're comparing.</p>

<p>Most fisheye lenses go to 180 degrees. it's kind of pointless to count them in; the boring answers is "180 degrees, all systems with a fisheye". The only lenses i know of doing more are a couple of very special lenses for the Nikon 35mm system that covered 220 degrees (they're huge and apparently meant for documenting cloud patterns).</p>

<p>For non-fisheye, the answer seems to be that very few MF lenses go beyond 90 degrees of coverage (that's about 45mm for 6x7 format for instance). Anything beyond that is really rare, which may be surprising as wider rectilinear lenses than that are not uncommon for 35mm where you can find lenses covering around 110 degrees (14mm for 35mm cameras, or 10mm for APS). My take on the reason is that MF systems have mostly been used by professionals rather than hobbyists, and the wide-angle distortion inherent in ultrawide rectilinear lenses starts to become really obvious beyond that angle of coverage. To people for whom overall image quality is important, that distortion becomes unacceptable for most situations, which makes ultrawides a rare niche. For hobbyists, on the other hand, distortion and veracity matters less, and ultrawides are fun to play with so the market is much larger.</p>

 

<p>It's not resolution, but the ability of the scanner to "see" in those darkest areas. If aq negative is too dense the scanner sees only blackness. Yes, the Coolscan scan shows a bit of that. Slide film with its high overall contrast is fairly difficult to scan well for this reason.</p>

<p>Lee, what I meant by "print directly from the scan" was exactly that: scan, then send the scanned image to the printer without any postprocessing in between. If you do that then sharpening as part of the scanning makes sense. But if you intend to postprocess the image then it's much preferable to have an unsharpened scan, and apply sharpening as the last step in that process instead.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>I haven't used the Mamiya 7, but I use a Pentax 67 quite a bit. It's not a small camera of course, but overall it's not all that big either. The big top of the line digital models of Canon and Nikon are actuall larger and heavier, and in practice, with two lenses (normal and wide angle) the Pentax 67 is no heavier to carry around than a DSLR and a couple of big lenses. A tip, if you decide on it, is that a lot of the bulk is in the prism finder, and you may find a waist-level finder to be worth it both for the reduced weight and for the better contact you can establish with people when you don't have a camera covering your face.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>If you mean the shadow side of the rocks, that looks like the scanner is blocking up. The black is darker than the scanner can pick up, and the brighter pixels is the lowest non-black. Then, as the image is brightened this point is brightened too - but the black stays black, so the transition becomes really visible. The best way to deal with it for me has been to make a small "toe" on the image curve in postprocessing so these areas get a decently smooth transition (at the cost of darkening these areas a bit of course).</p>

<p>Another thing: you seem to have a fair amount of sharpening active (there's halos around your dust spots). That will accentuate this (it brightens the pixellated transition), and increase the noise in your image too. It's generally not a good ida to have any sharpening unless you're going to print directly from the scan.</p>

<p>Edit: Are you by any chance scanning at 24 bit color and brightening the scanned image afterwards? The banding effect in the far background looks kind of like when you do big global brightness adjustments to an 8-bit per channel file. Editing in 8 bits is fine, as long as you've set the overall brightness and color of the image in 16 bit, either in the scanning software itself or in some external tool (I use UFRaw for my scans).</p>

 

<p>I don't see anything amiss in the image. Could you be a bit more specific, or post a crop where it's clearer?</p>