Scanner for B&W negatives

Im a film shooter 35mm, no plans to go to a larger format. Ive been shooting color negatives for a long time. Im just starting to get into B&W, so far Ive been having my local pro-lab processing and scanning the negatives for me. I want to start processing my B&W at home and scanning them myself. After the holidays Im going to purchase a film scanner. Ive been looking at the Coolscan IV and OpticFilm 7500i. From what I can find in the reviews the 7500i is the best bang for the buck. My questions is how well do these two scanner do with black and white negatives?

Mark

B&W

The Nikon can scan B&W, but can't speak for the OpticFilm 7500i.

But here's the deal, it is better to scan B&W was a monochrome color negative. You'll get more information out of the neg. Then in Photoshop you convert the image to grayscale after making all your corrections.

All the B&W images on my web site were made this way: Dead Link Removed

If you can swing it, I recommend the Nikon 5000 scanner instead.

I'm fairly new to this forum and though I searched, couldn't really find an answer so thought this might be the most likely place to stick this inquiry.

I shoot both film and digital. Recently returned to film, both 35mm and 4x5 (just learning the latter). On the 35mm side, I am currently limited to using an older Epson 2450 to scan negatives and it seems to do a credible job. I use an Epson R280 for printing. Now I know neither of these is optimal, but that's OK for now.

I have a basic question about scanning negatives, particularly the 35mm. At what selected DPI would scanning be best to get the most out of the negative for printing say up to 8x10 as a print output size? Seems like there is some threshold beyond which I'm just wasting scan time and file size considering printer limitations. Thanks in advance for putting up with a newbie question like this.

The basic way of figuring out the necessary scan resolution is to divide the length of the print by the length of the film, so:

10 inches / 1.5 inches = 6.66

Then multiply this by the print resolution, which is typically 300dpi, though some people insist Epson uses 360dpi. Assuming 300dpi:

300 x 6.66 = 2000dpi scanning resolution.

Make sure your scanner can go that high. Most flatbed scanners top out at a lower resolution than what the manufacturer states. I believe there are a couple threads on that topic.

Greg,

Thanks much for the quick reply. I will give it a try and see how it turns out.