Correlation between film format and scanner

Salt&Light · Apr 24, 2020

So, I'm considering getting a scanner for my negatives. I had an Epson V600, but recently returned it because I realized how I wanted a more professional-grade scanner in the medium price range.

I'm currently looking at the Reflecta RPS 10M (~$1000), which only scans 35mm, the Epson V800 (~$800), and the Braun FS 120 (~$2000). I will be using Silverfast AI studio 8. I shoot both 35mm and 120 film. Let's go off the assumption that I'm not getting into darkroom printing anytime soon as well.

With the Reflecta, I sacrifice the ability to scan 120 film, but get about 24 megapixels in each scan since the effective optimal resolution is 4300 ppi.

With the Epson V800, I'll get about 6.7 megapixels for 35mm film and 22 megapixels for 120 film (effective optimal resolution: 2300 ppi)

With the Braun FS 120, I can scan both 35mm and 120 film, and I am able to get good megapixels for both 35mm and 120 film scans. 13 megapixels for 35mm film and 42 megapixels for 120 (pixel overkill). But, it's the scanner with the highest price point.

I got into medium format thinking that since the negatives are bigger, I can get more pixels/resolution in my photos and that will make me able to get larger prints. I've also been pleased with the sharp mamiya lenses.

If I decide against the Braun, would it be worth it to stop shooting medium format and only shoot with my 35mm SLRs in order to get 24 megapixels in a scan (reflecta) versus 22 megapixels in a scan of 120 (Epson V800)? It seems like if I get the Reflecta, I'll only shoot 35mm, and if I get the Epson V800, I'll only shoot 120 since the megapixels I'll get scanning 35mm negatives is poor. Is it still worth it to keep shooting medium format?

Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.

MattKing · Apr 24, 2020

The difference between the megapixel numbers isn't the most important difference.
The optical performance of the scanner - how "sharp" the scan is - is more important.
I much prefer scanning medium format film over scanning 35mm.
I also somewhat prefer darkroom printing medium format film over darkroom printing 35mm.
There is a lot more information to start with in the medium format negative.
And the scanners that don't involve a glass platen - the Reflecta and the Braun - are potentially more able to make use of that information.

Les Sarile · Apr 24, 2020

I shoot mostly 35mm and the occassional medium format. I have the Coolscan 5000 for the 35mm and got the V700 for the MF film. It turned out to be very disappointing to get most out of 35mm but compromise on the more costly medium format. I suggest that if you have to pick one get the one that you won't have to compromise too much.

markbau · Apr 25, 2020

Just curious but why are you using film when you are going to digitise them, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to just start with a high end digital camera?

Les Sarile · Apr 25, 2020

markbau said:
Just curious but why are you using film when you are going to digitise them, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to just start with a high end digital camera?

Well for one, there is no high end camera that will take film and so I use one of my film cameras . . . from my 35mm section . . .

Another is that a film image is not the same as a digital image. For instance there is no highest end digital camera that can take a 45minute aperture priority autoexposure of a scene, all the while monitoring the scene for changes in lighting and changing exposure time accordingly. Such as this one taken on Kodak Ektar 100 using a Pentax LX.

Of course another obvious reason is that some images were taken long before the first digital camera was even thought of. This one of Super Ansochrome 1957.

All a scanner does - if it is any good, is extract the image from the source film with great fidelity so we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. Taking an image on film and then scanning it is nowhere near the same as taking an image on a digital camera as they can have very different responses.

But of course these are just some of my own opinions and I am sure others may have a different take on the question.

Kodachromeguy · Apr 26, 2020

Anvil, the mpixel numbers you cited: are those for jpeg? TIFF files? What output do you want from the scanner?

Salt&Light · Apr 27, 2020

Kodachromeguy said:
Anvil, the mpixel numbers you cited: are those for jpeg? TIFF files? What output do you want from the scanner?

I will only be outputting in .TIFF

I didn't know the file type mattered when it came to mpixels...

Salt&Light · Apr 27, 2020

markbau said:
Just curious but why are you using film when you are going to digitise them, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to just start with a high end digital camera?

I don't ever want analog film photography to die- I love it. Everything about it.

Adrian Bacon · Apr 27, 2020

ANVIL_OG said:
I will only be outputting in .TIFF

I didn't know the file type mattered when it came to mpixels...

it doesn’t. Total Megapixels is a function of the image pixel dimensions, height multiplied by width.

that being said, within that, different formats will store varying amounts of color resolution per pixel, so a jpeg has what’s referred to as 4:2:2 color, which is not even RGB but YCbCr color sampling. It consists of a full resolution black and white image (the Y part) and a quarter resolution for each of the CbCr color components. For TIFF files, it’s typically RGB color sampling and full color resolution for each color.

the key takeaway is that depending on your chosen format, you may or may not have full RGB color precision at each pixel in the image. This might not matter so much depending on what you’re doing with it, but it’s worth noting.

markbau · Apr 27, 2020

ANVIL_OG said:
I don't ever want analog film photography to die- I love it. Everything about it.

I don’t either, I expose many rolls and sheets every year and then print them in my darkroom. Digital is not a part of my process, I’ve just never understand exposing film only to digitise it.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 27, 2020

Adrian Bacon said:
it doesn’t. Total Megapixels is a function of the image pixel dimensions, height multiplied by width.

that being said, within that, different formats will store varying amounts of color resolution per pixel, so a jpeg has what’s referred to as 4:2:2 color, which is not even RGB but YCbCr color sampling. It consists of a full resolution black and white image (the Y part) and a quarter resolution for each of the CbCr color components. For TIFF files, it’s typically RGB color sampling and full color resolution for each color.

the key takeaway is that depending on your chosen format, you may or may not have full RGB color precision at each pixel in the image. This might not matter so much depending on what you’re doing with it, but it’s worth noting.

I'm curious Adrian if there's a difference between tiff and jpeg when scanning film vs. digital capture?

AndyH · Apr 28, 2020

markbau said:
Just curious but why are you using film when you are going to digitise them, wouldn’t it be a lot simpler to just start with a high end digital camera?

I can't answer for the OP, but I can answer for myself. Quite simply, I prefer using film cameras, the process, the forced selectivity, and the tonal curves of some of my favorite films. I am an amateur and don't have the space or the frequent use cycle to maintain a wet darkroom beyond what's needed for developing B/W and C-41 film. So I shoot film in my Hasselblad, Rollei, Nikon, Leica, etc. and develop it myself in a dishpan with a sous vide heater for temperature control.

If I want a high end print, I'll send the negative off to a commercial printer, but most of my distribution to friends and family is in the form of digital media or in smaller , 8x10 or 11x14 prints. So I'm scanning, currently on a V550, for that purpose. A full, color printing darkroom is an indulgence I don't have the time or space for, sadly enough.

Andy

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
I'm curious Adrian if there's a difference between tiff and jpeg when scanning film vs. digital capture?

Depending on what you're scanning, yes. For slides, probably not if you get the white balance and scanner exposure correct. jpegs are 8 bits, Tiffs can be pretty much any bit depth, within reason. If you scanned at 16 bits and saved as a jpeg, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference in final quality, but scanning at 8 bits, absolutely. Jpegs are best with sRGB, any scan you do will have to convert from the scanner raw to sRGB (and you convert to sRGB when saving as jpeg in software), so color wise, you won't miss or see much difference unless you have a really new display that can actually display a larger color space than sRGB.

For Negative film, I'd never scan as Jpeg. Not enough bits, not enough color resolution, wrong color scheme. Jpegs are fine for converting to jpeg after you have a positive color image that you're not planning to edit/post process any more.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 29, 2020

Adrian Bacon said:
Depending on what you're scanning, yes. For slides, probably not if you get the white balance and scanner exposure correct. jpegs are 8 bits, Tiffs can be pretty much any bit depth, within reason. If you scanned at 16 bits and saved as a jpeg, you wouldn't be able to tell a difference in final quality, but scanning at 8 bits, absolutely. Jpegs are best with sRGB, any scan you do will have to convert from the scanner raw to sRGB (and you convert to sRGB when saving as jpeg in software), so color wise, you won't miss or see much difference unless you have a really new display that can actually display a larger color space than sRGB.

For Negative film, I'd never scan as Jpeg. Not enough bits, not enough color resolution, wrong color scheme. Jpegs are fine for converting to jpeg after you have a positive color image that you're not planning to edit/post process any more.

I just received a V850 needed to scan my new 4x5 film. So I should be getting better scans over my V600 with medium format that I shoot as well. WIth the V600 I would scan 2400 bit 16 bit color (negative and positive color film) or 16 bit BW and save as tiff. I might use PS Elements which converts to 8 bits for posting on the web. Sometimes I use Lightroom 6. I have a NEC calibratable monitor with SPectraview II puck. WHile I can see different color spaces, I keep it a sRGB when editing because the end result goes on the web anyway. I'm not printing right now. If I do, it will be rarely and I intend to drum scan and print professionally the few prints I would do. All my processing is done in a pro lab as I have no darkroom. I also display slideshows on my 75" UHDTV. I intend to make some table top photo books. For that, I'll use my own scans. (sRGB??)

SO with all that, should I change any of my parameters? Change the color space? Bits? Stick with LR or is it OK to use 8 bit Elements? Other? Thanks.

Les Sarile · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
SO with all that, should I change any of my parameters? Change the color space? Bits? Stick with LR or is it OK to use 8 bit Elements? Other? Thanks.

Curious why you would use Elements when you have LR. Are you just more comfortable with Elements?

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 29, 2020

Les Sarile said:
Curious why you would use Elements when you have LR. Are you just more comfortable with Elements?

First, I scan flat and adjust in post. Then I find adjusting levels in Elements is easier. In Lightroom, I never seem to know which sliders to use to get the same affect. Maybe you can help me on that? Tks.

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
I just received a V850 needed to scan my new 4x5 film. So I should be getting better scans over my V600 with medium format that I shoot as well. WIth the V600 I would scan 2400 bit 16 bit color (negative and positive color film) or 16 bit BW and save as tiff. I might use PS Elements which converts to 8 bits for posting on the web. Sometimes I use Lightroom 6. I have a NEC calibratable monitor with SPectraview II puck. WHile I can see different color spaces, I keep it a sRGB when editing because the end result goes on the web anyway. I'm not printing right now. If I do, it will be rarely and I intend to drum scan and print professionally the few prints I would do. All my processing is done in a pro lab as I have no darkroom. I also display slideshows on my 75" UHDTV. I intend to make some table top photo books. For that, I'll use my own scans. (sRGB??)

SO with all that, should I change any of my parameters? Change the color space? Bits? Stick with LR or is it OK to use 8 bit Elements? Other? Thanks.

I have the v850 Pro. It’s quite good, though I never use the film carriers and always just scan directly on the platen glass in 8x10 mode at 4800 dpi. If it were me, I’d scan as 16 bit tiff in ProPhoto color space and use LR. LR is superior to elements, both in image manipulation and image catalog management. If you want jpegs, you can export direct to jpegs from LR and it will handle converting to sRGB and give you the option of how much to compress, what image dimensions you want to export to as well. If you’re not as familiar with LR, it’s worth getting up to speed with it as it’s Adobe’s current state of the art outside of the full photoshop.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 29, 2020

Adrian, How big are your 8x10 tiff files at 4800? I assume LR can handle them? Should I use 4800 or stick to 2400? People have said there's not much to gain over 2400.

As an aside, since I also shoot digital (Sony RX100iv), should I shoot in Adobe RGB or just RGB the two color spaces available?

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
First, I scan flat and adjust in post. Then I find adjusting levels in Elements is easier. In Lightroom, I never seem to know which sliders to use to get the same affect. Maybe you can help me on that? Tks.

in the develop module you’d first adjust the overall brightness and white balance using the exposure slider and whitebalance/tint sliders. Underneath that, you’d use the contrast, blacks, whites, shadows, and highlights sliders next. Each is labeled as to what they affect. You can either use the sliders directly, or use your mouse and put it on the histogram and drag it around and it will affect the slider for that part of the histogram. If you want more specific control, the tone curve panel further down let’s you manipulate the tone curve for all the channels at once or individually for each color. The order of the controls in the develop module is the order of the operation application from top to bottom.

Alan Edward Klein · Apr 29, 2020

Adrian Bacon said:
in the develop module you’d first adjust the overall brightness and white balance using the exposure slider and whitebalance/tint sliders. Underneath that, you’d use the contrast, blacks, whites, shadows, and highlights sliders next. Each is labeled as to what they affect. You can either use the sliders directly, or use your mouse and put it on the histogram and drag it around and it will affect the slider for that part of the histogram. If you want more specific control, the tone curve panel further down let’s you manipulate the tone curve for all the channels at once or individually for each color. The order of the controls in the develop module is the order of the operation application from top to bottom.

Which slider correlate to the Levels slider in Elements?

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
Adrian, How big are your 8x10 tiff files at 4800? I assume LR can handle them? Should I use 4800 or stick to 2400? People have said there's not much to gain over 2400.

As an aside, since I also shoot digital (Sony RX100iv), should I shoot in Adobe RGB or just RGB the two color spaces available?

my usage isn’t typical as I use Vuescan and feed it into my software. If you’re scanning a full 8x10 you can’t actually scan and save as 4800 dpi 16 bit tiff files because the file size is larger than what tiff can handle, so I tell Vuescan to scale it down by half while saving, so my full 8x10 scan is 2400 dpi. For 4x5, 4800 dpi is 460 megapixels and comes out to just under 4GB per image. You don’t actually need that big of a scan unless you’re planning to print super huge. If you figure 300 pixels per inch for current digital prints, you can print 8x10 with a 600 dpi scan, 16x20 with a 1200 dpi scan, and 32x40 with a 2400 dpi scan. With 4x5 and 8x10, it’s not about capturing maximum resolution, and more about capturing for your intended output.

and yes, LR can handle pretty much any image size you could throw at it. It does have limits, but they are ridiculously huge.

kahlheins · Apr 29, 2020

Are you definitely set on a dedicated scanner? I bought an Epson V550 and sold it again to commit to DSLR scanning. The results with my Nikon D850 are just so much better it's incredible. In terms of workflow speed, I think they are comparable. A used Nikon D800 with a macro lens will also set you back less than a decent film scanner.

Here is a great article about the workflow, and Nate's Lightroom Plugin for the conversion is fantastic: http://natephotographic.com/dslr-film-scanning-perfect-color-negatives/
Don't worry, you don't need a Lightroom subscription, buying an old stand-alone license for Lightroom 6 is what I use as well.

I use a Lomography film holder with this setup, but I am about to replace that with a custom built film holder to process an entire roll in one go. I used to have some slight problems with dust (see below), but all those problems were also resolved after learning with my first few rolls of film.

Here is a scan of one of my images (scanned at less than half the possible resolution and compressed for upload) and a detail crop:

Crop thumbnail:

Overall, the setup is comparable in terms of cost with a flatbed scanning workflow, but in my opinion is much more flexible in terms of film formats. Also, I am icnredibly happy with the results, as the colours also come out a lot nicer than on the Epson in my opinion.

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
Which slider correlate to the Levels slider in Elements?

if you just want to control the black and white levels, the black and white sliders. The midpoint is controlled with general exposure. The shadows and highlights sliders are two additional control points over the levels sliders in elements/photoshop. Whatch the histogram as you change the sliders. The clipping indicators will show when you’ve dragged the black or white sliders too far, and you can mouse over the clipping indicator and it will highlight in the image where it’s clipping.

Wallendo · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
Which slider correlate to the Levels slider in Elements?

That is one quirk of Adobe software I find annoying.
I actually use the subscription PhotoShop/Lightroom combination and there are some tasks which are just so much easier to do in one program and seem to work quite differently from the process in the other. In fact Lightroom Classic, the desktop version I use most, looks a lot like Lightroom, the web based version, but many functions are different. I really miss the levels control in LR, and frequently pass my scans images through PS for levels adjustments and cropping before importing into LR for fine tuning.

Adrian Bacon · Apr 29, 2020

Alan Edward Klein said:
As an aside, since I also shoot digital (Sony RX100iv), should I shoot in Adobe RGB or just RGB the two color spaces available?

also, if possible, shoot raw. LR has a built in prow processor. Otherwise, just keep it sRGB if shooting jpeg.

Correlation between film format and scanner

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