jpeg versus tif files

[David T T]

So, this is why this lab says there's no appreciable difference between their TIFF scans and their JPEG scans... they're all 8 bit. Correct? While I'm loath to take my film business outside the local community, I can't help but wonder who is out there commercially doing 16 bit TIFF scans. Is there anyone? Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed to this thread! I'm really just trying to get my head around the whole concept of fidelity with regards to scanning negatives. I'm not threatening to blow my negatives up to 24 x 30, or I'd be getting them done via an enlarger by an inevitably non-local source. I'm just looking for a workflow that preserves to the greatest degree possible the information stored in medium format film, which is quite a bit. I'm very inclined to use local sources, and am willing to make sacrifices towards this end, but possibly with regards to special projects at least, I'd like to know my options. Cheers y'all, I very much appreciate this community.

 

[Prest_400]

This, this, this David!

I get the talk that on a finished/graded file (as premium labs do), TIFF doesn't offer much of an advantage to JPEG. I was happy to find a lab which charged good prices and no added tariff for TIFF's, they got a Noritsu in but supposedly removed the TIFF option uploads. Of course at 1GB per roll I get they were getting slow to upload. I'll ask if sending a USB drive allows them to do TIFF again.
Have sat at a Frontier workstation that a lab brought for testing and after the scanning (these things make it a breeze), LR is run to do the grading/massaging. I don't remember looking if all throughout was done in Jpeg, which would be a bit of a sacrilege. They got some presets configured which determine resolution (and I think format too).

I'm with you, It irks me quite a bit that getting the power of Medium Format requires going quite beyond the "Medium" 3000x2000 jpeg scans, and Large TIFF scans cost an arm and leg (perhaps $25/120 roll on the most famous labs?).

I've looked into it and it seems that the Frontier sp-3000 can indeed export as TIF files. I wonder if the resistance to providing this file format is that they have to reconfigure the scanner to output TIFs for that job.

It also seems that JPEGs are 8 bit color, while TIFs are 16 bit. So a JPEG converted to a TIF would lose 8 bits of color information. Is this true, and if so wouldn't that be a significant loss of quality?

AFAIK, I saw and got .BMP files from Frontiers which may be just 8 bit. If you read about Frontier and Noritsu, the latter HS1800 is praised for productivity but also brute force of RAW 16bit scanning at large sizes.

 

[Bob Carnie]

So, this is why this lab says there's no appreciable difference between their TIFF scans and their JPEG scans... they're all 8 bit. Correct? While I'm loath to take my film business outside the local community, I can't help but wonder who is out there commercially doing 16 bit TIFF scans. Is there anyone?

I am not sure who scans in 8 bit these days, the last time I did this was with the frontier for medium rez for websites.

 

[pbromaghin]

Get a scanner of your own. People badmouth flatbed scanners, but my scans come out a lot better than the local lab produces.