Scan medium format with full frame pixel shift or scanner

[Les Sarile]

Also, if one is doing two shots and stitch you'll get pretty good resolution. And still quicker than scanning.

My color negative conversion workflow is not close to the Coolscan+Nikonscan results in terms of speed and quality and the ICE is pretty amazing. Maybe a version of AI will be able to address these issues for me but apparently not today anyway.

Kodak 160VC-036 Adobe AI vs Coolscan ICE by Les DMess, on Flickr

Maybe not for your consideration but the Coolscan 5000 & 9000 are both faster then the 4000 & 8000 specially when ICE is turned on. For instance a full res scan using ICE with the 5000 is about 55 seconds per frame and about 35 seconds without. I recall the 4000 is in a few minutes.

 

[Ardpatrick]

Short of drum scanning or maybe a Hasselbald x5, I doubt there is much of an upgrade possible compared to the capacity of a Coolscan 8000. So I agree with Alexander there.

ICE is useful in many but not all circumstances and I don’t believe the lack of it is a deal-breaker unless you are doing high volume scanning.

I don’t have a high end film scanner (although I’ve lots of experience of both the X5 and various Coolscans) So I have gone down the road of inventing or reinventing a DIY film scanning setup with a dslr. I scan 6x7 B&W neg in two stitched exposures using a D800 with a micro-Nikkor 105mm. I have a massive Linhof copy stand, use strobe illumination, and anti-newton glass. I’m forever trialing different lenses including very high end Rodenstock apo’s etc. So far the trusty micro-Nikkor 105 has won out.

Simple stitching results in photoshop gives near 500mb 16 bit Tiffs where I can see grain clearly corner to corner. So not bad and certainly more pixel resolution than my Delta 400 needs. Balancing DoF with refraction, alignment, and even illumination are ongoing concerns. Its a lot of work and if I didn’t already own a lot of useful darkroom / studio equipment, it could also be quite expensive.

I may have a dslr scan of a 6x7 neg previously scanned on an x5. I’ll try to post a comparison.

 

[Ardpatrick]

Another thought I don’t think 4000 dpi is necessary, certainly not for faster film stocks. The x5 I used for scanning sheet film maxed out at 2040 dpi optical resolution with my T-max 100. I was often shooting very detailed subject matter and I never felt the lack of resolution. Obviously there are a few finer grain films and your needs may be exceedingly demanding. But for the most part I don’t think scanner resolution is the big issue.

 

[Ardpatrick]

I meant defraction not refraction above!