Choices, when actual printing is not possible

David A. Goldfarb said:

If you can calibrate your own scanning process, you can make it work for you, but a contact sheet takes out all the variables of scanner focus and unwanted sharpening.

Where I discovered this problem was when I took my color neg film to Duggal a few years ago (otherwise a first-rate New York lab), and ordered contact sheets only to discover that they had switched to making digital proof sheets scanned in the sleeves and obviously sharpened, because there is no way to make a really sharp scan or contact print from a negative in a sleeve, and once any kind of digital sharpening is introduced, there is no way to tell if the original neg is sharp without inspecting it directly.

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That's unfortunate. I do my contact sheets with the negatives out of the sleeves, which helps a lot. For the most part I can tell if I have the correct depth of field and/or sharpness in the contact print, and I won't even have to scan. But I have no problems getting scans that are sharp with all of the auto features turned off in the software. What I usually do to check the negs, is to import them as if they were E6 film, and have everything in the scanner set to the same value every time. Helps with consistency.
With negs that are troublesome (35mm Tri-X being the absolute worst) and won't lie flat, I tape the negative to the scanner platen and get nice uniform scans that way. That's how I prefer to scan most negatives, but it's a bit messy.

It is definitely true that the 'auto' features in the scanning software (I use VueScan) do tell a lie of what's actually in the negative.

Jesper said:

If you look at localdarkroom.com there is a public darkroom available in Athens. Could this be an option?

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It is. We welcome all new members that want to make good use of our public darkroom. Especially if this is going to prevent them from taking a bad turn in their lives (like scanning negs, for example) !!