Looking for experiences/advice on high-end scanning options!

Les Sarile said:

And of course sharp and high resolution are not necessarily the same thing.

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Of course, technically, sharpness can be defined as the combination of resolution and acutance...

... but artistically the concept is quite ample.

About that subject, I found this book is quite interesting:



Personally, I contact print 8x10" negatives on photopaper, with the 8x10" print being worth probably 300 to 500 MPix effective, it can be explored with a x8 magnifier without noticing a flaw... but this does not make the image sharp per se.

If we have a sharp idea for the image then we may be on track.

Les Sarile said:

And of course sharp and high resolution are not necessarily the same thing.

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This is the truth.

Les Sarile said:

Perhaps since you did this for your mother that it has content that glosses over any technical flaws - if there are any. Besides, a negative comment may not be in their best interest if they don't want to be disowned . . .

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As I said-- the shop, which at the time was a major photo lab in the area, also thought it was perfectly reasonable. I admit-- it's not so sharp you can cut yourself, but it's one of my favorite photographs-- and I have a tendency towards strong self-criticism.

And it hangs over a sofa, keeping anyone from getting really close.

grat said:

As I said-- the shop, which at the time was a major photo lab in the area, also thought it was perfectly reasonable. I admit-- it's not so sharp you can cut yourself, but it's one of my favorite photographs-- and I have a tendency towards strong self-criticism.

And it hangs over a sofa, keeping anyone from getting really close.

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You mean the shop who made it for you that you paid said it was also perfectly reasonable . . . If I were the one who made it and you paid me I would have left off reasonable . . .

But as I said, it may in fact be as you say it is!

Light Capture said:

This is absolutely correct. Great care and technique is needed to extract maximum.

Even with quality macro lenses resolution is around 5-5.5 micrometers at 1:1 mag for DSLR scanning methods.
That's again meaningless number without glass holders. Graph would be very similar but with macro lenses resolution drops much faster with film curling.
Fractions of a millimeter make a difference. Also, very few lenses can come to this resolution at required magnification in corners.

If you want fast results, they're not much different than other methods. For top notch results, great care is needed.

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Yes I agree with this. My experience is that getting really good results with any method requires lots of care, attention, knowledge and skill, and this is especially true with the camera capture method, at least in any configuration I have tried so far. The opening post was about whether this could work in an educational setting, and this is where the problem lies - what you need is to have a process which only requires a minimum of these things from the operator, because in most cases, you will have a stream of unskilled operators and limited technical support time. You will often be dealing with students who are 'trying out' film, and who will be put off and never use it again if they don't get good results or it's too complex to do. This is the challenge - to provide something which yields a high quality level reliably without requiring a lot of explanation or prior knowledge from the user. The Flextight scanners offer the best quality/ease of use equation which I have come across so far, and yet, I have just spent a week creating an instructional video for it so that a member of staff doesn't have to spend 40 minutes explaining it every time a new student wants to use it. You also need a system which doesn't require calibration or maintenance regularly, like the Flextight. To my knowledge, the only real professional camera capture solutions which approach or exceed this are those provided by Digital Transitiions Cultural Heritage, the cost of which are beyond what most educational institutions will be willing to pay. I'm sure a workable solution does exist at a more reasonable cost, but it's not obvious what that solution is, and whatever it is, I don't think most users will be achieving the same quality level as the Flextight with it.

On the subject of resolution, despite many seemingly wishing to minimising its importance, it is very important as far as I'm concerned. There are many other important elements as well, but resolution - the ability to resolve the details of the film object - is absolutely important. Without good resolution (the product of sensor, lens and focus), you may miss out on a ton of captured image detail, plus the character of the film grain. One usage of the systems we have in our institution is for large scale exhibition prints, at which point these factors make a huge difference to the impact of the print. The difference between a V800 scan and a Flextight scan of a 35mm frame for this purpose is huge - and most of this difference comes down to the resolution. If resolution isn't important, why did we bother to focus our enlarger carefully back in the darkroom, or for that matter, bust a gut trying to ensure we got things sharp when taking the photograph? Why do many who do camera scanning of medium format film feel the need to do multi-capture stitching? The only reason is resolution. Resolution is important, and getting lots of it is difficult.

I may have missed this. But how many rolls of film will each student do each term? How many students? Who's developing the film?

If the number of rolls is small, it may be cheaper to have a lab-developed and scan the rolls.

What are you trying to accomplish in the class? Teach scanning? teach composition: Teach developing? What are the class's objectives?

jgboothe said:

The difference between a V800 scan and a Flextight scan of a 35mm frame for this purpose is huge - and most of this difference comes down to the resolution.

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Of course, the x1/x5 are a plain overkill for 35mm delivering 6000 to 7000 effective dpi... being able to depict grain accurately, an impressive machine.

But in practice most of the 35mm shots are made handheld and/or textures have not "micro-costrast" enough to pull more than 50lp/mm from film, and/or subject is in the DOF and not in the perfect plane of focus. So, in general, at the end a V800 will extract all the recorded quality at least in the 95% of the cases. Not many casual shots surpase 40lp/mm in practice.


Still, somebody shooting always on tripod, at perfect aperture, mirror up, all in perfect foucs and nothing in the DOF, sharp film... then the V800 may come short for 35mm.

For MF and up the V800 will be sound always.

Still one year ago the V700 was tested very seriously vs Creos and a drum on MF Portra 160, and no difference could be found, but the guy was totally proficient and operated the V700 optimally, calibrating height with a resolution slide.

Alan Edward Klein said:

I may have missed this. But how many rolls of film will each student do each term? How many students? Who's developing the film?

If the number of rolls is small, it may be cheaper to have a lab-developed and scan the rolls.

What are you trying to accomplish in the class? Teach scanning? teach composition: Teach developing? What are the class's objectives?

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Well... recently you compared a TMX 4x5" Epson scan with a drum scan finding no quality difference. An it was a quite sharp Sironar S shot (not a mundane glass)... At least for LF the Epson behaved superb.

Still you had to calibrate height in the Epson in a quite proficient way...

jgboothe said:

I don't think most users will be achieving the same quality level as the Flextight with it.

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This reminded me of a discussion back in early 2000 when a pro photog said a 3MP Canon D30 outresolves an Imacon Flextight scanned Fuji Provia 100 35mm film . . . https://luminous-landscape.com/d30-vs-film/
No, obviously not all users may be able to achieve good quality no matter the gear . . .

Les Sarile said:

This reminded me of a discussion back in early 2000 when a pro photog said a 3MP Canon D30 outresolves an Imacon Flextight scanned Fuji Provia 100 35mm film . . . https://luminous-landscape.com/d30-vs-film/
No, obviously not all users may be able to achieve good quality no matter the gear . . .

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Ridiculous. Even if you only look at the miniatures, you can see that the Provia 100F scan is more resolved than the D30 shot

jgboothe said:

Resolution is important, and getting lots of it is difficult.

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Resolution is not important IMO. I would suggest uniformity of resolution is more important. I have seen awful medium format DSLR scans where the operator was paying way too much attention to resolution in or around the immediate neighbourhood of the DSLR focusing point. The result was a 'scan' with perfectly focused grain in the focus point and visibly poorer peripheral detail, colour fringes determined by a poor choice of macro lens which was adding its optical aberrations to the mix, not to mention colour artifacts determined by poor planarity of the film and by the fact that the DSLR used featured an X-trans sensor (notoriously incredibly poor at resolving detail - reports of 'painterly effect' of X-trans sensors abound).

I think there is so much more than resolution to a correct film scan. If people's only concern is 'resolution' - why not go out and shoot with that 4000$ digital camera, to start with? Why bother with film, unless we're talking about scanning historical film of some vintage?

albireo said:

4K digital camera

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4K is outdated for digital cameras. My 4 years old K-1 offers 8K

But I make more resolved shots with my Plaubel Makina 67 and Adox CMS II 20, which is nearly grainless...

Les Sarile said:

No, obviously not all users may be able to achieve good quality no matter the gear . . .

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You also won't... one thing is shooting targets in a lab and another one is real photography.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Eleven#/media/File:Capa,_D-Day2.jpg

Here mate Capa could not get a single sharp shot with a top notch Contax II, in the best gear of the era crop... and those shots are dubbed Magnificient.

But it was the Omaha beach in a particularly busy day...

even on a tripod, sometimes you have to stop a lot to get DOF, enjoying a nice diffraction deal... or you have to shot with available light at low speed...

Additionally, if your target has 1:2 "microcontrast" textures then your resolving power will be at extintion by 50lp/mm even with sharp film...

Personally, somtimes I record 800 Mpix effective in a 8x10" shot, but also I'm totally proud of some shots sporting perhaps 3MPix effective.

(Instead Into The Jaws Of Death is "sharp", but this was the Utah beach, and the NG Pilot of the craft, RF Sargent, had to expose his nose ).

fs999 said:

Ridiculous. Even if you only look at the miniatures, you can see that the Provia 100F scan is more resolved than the D30 shot

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Yeah, discussions got heated and devolved quickly. Who knew that the easiest characteristic to verify - resolution, had so many interpretations . . .

138S said:

Here mate Capa could not get a single sharp shot with a top notch Contax II, in the best gear of the era crop... and those shots are dubbed Magnificient.

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Like I said above, content trumps any technical merits - or lack of.

In the case of warhol, maybe neither matters because it's art . . .

138S said:

Well... recently you compared a TMX 4x5" Epson scan with a drum scan finding no quality difference. An it was a quite sharp Sironar S shot (not a mundane glass)... At least for LF the Epson behaved superb.

Still you had to calibrate height in the Epson in a quite proficient way...

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That was a 4x5 BW Tmax 100 with a V850 not a V700 compared to a Howtek 8000.
https://www.largeformatphotography....-Epson-V850-flatbed-scanners&highlight=howtek

138S said:

You also won't... one thing is shooting targets in a lab and another one is real photography.

View attachment 263840

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Eleven#/media/File:Capa,_D-Day2.jpg

Here mate Capa could not get a single sharp shot with a top notch Contax II, in the best gear of the era crop... and those shots are dubbed Magnificient.

But it was the Omaha beach in a particularly busy day...

even on a tripod, sometimes you have to stop a lot to get DOF, enjoying a nice diffraction deal... or you have to shot with available light at low speed...

Additionally, if your target has 1:2 "microcontrast" textures then your resolving power will be at extintion by 50lp/mm even with sharp film...

Personally, somtimes I record 800 Mpix effective in a 8x10" shot, but also I'm totally proud of some shots sporting perhaps 3MPix effective.

(Instead Into The Jaws Of Death is "sharp", but this was the Utah beach, and the NG Pilot of the craft, RF Sargent, had to expose his nose ).

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I agree. He should have used a tripod.

Old Gregg said:

Helge, I provided not one but about 10 examples, both 35mm and 6x6. Scroll up, download, print and see for yourself. Apologies for making them hard-to-notice hyperlinks instead of using the attachment feature, but that's the only way I know how to post full-size scans here.

I am agreeing with you that there are emulsions out there with amazing resolution potential (my personal experience is limited only to CMS20 in that regard), I am just pointing out that:

* The films we actually shoot are nothing like that.
* One cannot buy a new scanner with an effective resolution higher than a modern digital camera.
* Your remark about "drug store print quality" is wildly off and borderline offensive.
* Resolution is overrated anyway, as most people do not print and even when they do, that's rarely bigger than 11x14" or so.

Even Ektar in 35mm doesn't begin to stress the capabilities of a Fuji's 24MP sensor. I did not observe any additional detail from Plustek 120 Pro 35mm scans vs a DSLR, even after adjusting the focus. Therefore I have settled to downsampling all of my 35mm scans to 5000x3400px to keep the file size reasonable, and even that feels excessive for 99% of my pictures as they simply don't have 17MP of useful detail.

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*They are quite a bit closer than you seem to suppose, and to get the best out of them you need to scan at at least 8000dpi. Whether you need to do that for your particular wants and use, is another question. My examples posted previously simply and clearly shows that. And it's not that hard to get there, or close with camera scanning.
*No and you don't need to. With a macro lens and stitching even 24 MP is enough.
*Now you are just looking to get offended. I wrote: "A single grab with a 24MP camera can be fine as a contact print/drug store print sort of type "what's one the roll" scenario, and to show your film-authenticity off on Instagram." I clearly wasn't talking about your scans specifically (since the links are rather hard to notice, other then the dog one), merely the principle.
Though even a good 4K screen is piss poor as a display medium of photos, and especially as a showcase of the macro effect of high resolution, I can see a lot of artifacting that I bet would appear in a 8x10 print. Would it be acceptable? It depends on what you compare with. Compared side by side with a higher res scan, I'm almost certain anyone would notice.
* We should get people to print. It's where photography lives. You should insist on your photos, not make them convenient to avoid.

Of course a heck of a lot hinges on the optics, shutter speed and if a tripod, or steadying surface was used when taking. Lacking that, you of course get lower resolution. That goes for any kind of still photography. In that case it's of course a matter of judgement whether you want to use the little extra time.
But it's not alchemy to take a sharp photo.
Optimal aperture, no motion blur and reasonable quality film is something most photographers can satisfy, if not every time, then sometimes.
If you "scan" at 24 MP you will get a result that is sub 24 MP in resolution potential. That's just sampling.
Somehow "the maximum resolution" of 135 always seems to scale with the equipment commonly used to scan. Apparently it's very easy to mistake the artifacts of a suboptimal scan with grain and The Limit™.

The whole point of my initial comment was to make potential students enthusiastic about film, and not just see it as a curio.
You do that by showing them the best.
I've met some students who quickly developed a zeal for film, with easy access to equipment and guidance, and then just a quickly dropped the interest when the course was done.

Thinking that you can easily get superior results with a digital camera, or even emulate "the film look", would be a logical conclusion and a convenient lazy way out, for someone who had only seen flatbed scans and single frame camera grabs.

Of course we are lucky if it's even one in ten, who sticks with it. But that is still one additional person who can aid film photography, by evangelising and practice.

@Helge The problem I see all too often is people who don't have adequate experience of the potential qualities of a purely analogue workflow (which doesn't need to be complex - good lenses & solid enlarger correctly focused) accepting bad quality scans as being 'correct' because that is what they are told is 'true' by gatekeepers who themselves don't really have adequate experience either. Once they see what is actually possible, they tend to not be terribly accepting of inadequate resolution of film detail after that - n.b. this is not about the resolution ability of the film, but about the ability of the digitisation device to adequately sample the visible characteristics of the emulsion being scanned. With some images, an inadequate sample rate may be fine, but in many other cases, important fine detail is lost. And that's before the rather complex problems of the differences in effective MTF performance between a direct print on darkroom paper and the response of the digital sensor have to be considered (though in comparison to everything else here, that's something to worry about once the basics of adequate reproduction are dealt with).

Helge said:

Somehow "the maximum resolution" of 135 always seems to scale with the equipment commonly used to scan. Apparently it's very easy to mistake the artifacts of a suboptimal scan with grain and The Limit™.

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All I'll say is that a Rodagon-G or other suitably optimised mural lens will leave you utterly bemused about the thick layer of excuses that are spread around about the maximum 'enlargeability' of 35mm - what matters is that the visual granularity of the emulsion isn't turned to wooly mush by the optical system.

Even if someone would make a turn-key, high resolution digital camera capture (scanning) device capable of all possible formats and with a variable color temp lamp source, I seriously doubt few beyond a high-end lab could pay the retail price for such a machine.

If you won't use a consumer grade scanner, homebrew is likely to be the only economical avenue well into the future.

Lachlan Young said:

@Helge The problem I see all too often is people who don't have adequate experience of the potential qualities of a purely analogue workflow

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First thing I did was send a collection of various 35mm color films I shot to have 20" X 30" optical prints made so I could compare my scans not only in res but also color and contrast. B&W I printed myself for comparison. Obviously different paper types greatly affect detail shown. Super glossy can show more detail given size but who wants to use that all the time.

Les Sarile said:

First thing I did was send a collection of various 35mm color films I shot to have 20" X 30" optical prints made so I could compare my scans not only in res but also color and contrast. B&W I printed myself for comparison. Obviously different paper types greatly affect detail shown. Super glossy can show more detail given size but who wants to use that all the time.

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Did you use a lab that did a lot of mural work or not? If not, 20x is pushing the limits of most non-mural optimised enlarging lenses for optimal quality.

Les Sarile said:

Like I said above, content trumps any technical merits - or lack of.

In the case of warhol, maybe neither matters because it's art . . .

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Les Sarile said:

No, obviously not all users may be able to achieve good quality no matter the gear . . .

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Yes... but let me rectify in the way I reply your post: What is being able to good quality ?

We may agree that a 35mm shot may sport (say) 100 lp/mm resolving power in some spots of the image that have perfect focus...

What I point is that an image sporting 50lp/mm resolution at extintion may not usually come from the user being unable, simply many situations in real potography delivers that inferior yield, even for a totally proficient photographer. Just consider that +99% of the shots are made handheld, while it is not impossible you get a totally sharp image you have a high probablility you had vibration enough to limit resolving power under 50lp/mm.

or... Is shooting on tripod mandatory ?

Lachlan Young said:

Did you use a lab that did a lot of mural work or not? If not, 20x is pushing the limits of most non-mural optimised enlarging lenses for optimal quality.

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Fuji Lab in Arizona. I talked to their reps at a PMA show in Vegas and they said that's no problem.

138S said:

Yes... but let me rectify in the way I reply your post: What is being able to good quality ?

We may agree that a 35mm shot may sport (say) 100 lp/mm resolving power in some spots of the image that have perfect focus...

What I point is that an image sporting 50lp/mm resolution at extintion may not usually come from the user being unable, simply many situations in real potography delivers that inferior yield, even for a totally proficient photographer. Just consider that +99% of the shots are made handheld, while it is not impossible you get a totally sharp image you have a high probablility you had vibration enough to limit resolving power under 50lp/mm.

or... Is shooting on tripod mandatory ?

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The Coolscans I have don't know whether I shot the frame optimally or not. I also know what it can achieve and now it's consistenty over thousands of scans. Much more impressive to me are the results in color/contrast and all without drama.