Scanning fibre prints for digital projection

Henry Carter

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Until recently, when lecturing, I showed Scala copy slides of my B&W fibre prints. With the demise of Scala and the increasing difficulty in finding optical slide projectors at out of town meetings, I must succumb to a digital solution.

I have access to an Epson 1000XL flatbed scanner and hence can scan 11 X 14" original prints. I can then insert the scanned files into a powerpoint slideshow for digital projection. I speak to groups of up to 450 people and hence the projected size will have to be BIG.

Given my lack of experience with digital scans, I have a simple question. What is the best file type (jpeg, pdf etc) to insert into a powepoint presentation, and at what resolution or file size should the prints be scanned?

I thank you in advance for helping me to make the leap...
 

jtk

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You would probably be better off with digital photographs, tho excellent copies do require skills. Alternately you might copy with a reversal film of your choice, scanning that with something better than Epson.
 

Pieter12

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I think the limiting factor here may be the digital projector--what is its resolution? It would be overkill to have huge files and a mediocre projection system. An LED video wall might be a better solution if available. I am not a PP user, more of a victim of PP presentations. I have yet to see one where the image quality looked high-res. How many images who you put in? If they are large files, your presentation might bog down. Usually one has to find a compromise between file size and image quality.
 

jtk

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I should have explained that properly copying with a camera becomes better than scanning if paper TEXTURE is relevant. Texture requires light that can cast its shadow...not flat/soft.
 

PhilBurton

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Absolutely agree with this post. A few years ago I was a a club meeting where there was an all-day set of slide shows with different presenters, a mix of Kodachrome and digital projector. The Kodachrome slides looked way better than the digital photos, even though some of the digital photo files may have had superior resolution or color depth as RAW files. Unless you have access to a really high quality projector, your digital images will look mediocre.
 

Ian Grant

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My experience is FB prints don't scan well and that you are better off making copies with a DSLR, in the same way as you did with Scala. Glossy RC prints scan well but with RC the paper texture drops the quality. The other option which I now use is to scan the negatives and then match the results to the prints, but I've been doing this for years so find it easy.

Ian
 

Chan Tran

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JPEG is fine as it's small and you don't really lose any quality saving the files as JPEG after and post processing you did after you either scan or copy with a digital camera. Resolution is depending on the projector resolution.
 

Pieter12

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One note on scanning large prints...the large surface area can be quite full of dust. Clean the print and scanner glass carefully and go over the scan afterward to remove what you've missed.
 

MattKing

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Satin surface RC paper scans quite well.
 

Adrian Bacon

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+1

Most digital projectors, unless brand new are Full HD at best, which is 1920x1080 pixels, or two Megapixels. A really high end projector would be 4K, or 3840x2160 pixels, basically ~8 Megapixels. The vast majority of projectors will be even lower resolution than Full HD unless it was specifically designed to project HD video and not act as a large computer display.

The point is, you need a shockingly low amount of resolution. The larger the projected image, the further away the audience is, and the less resolution you actually need. I'd make your powerpoint slides Full HD aspect ratio and resolution, and your scans match.
 

PhilBurton

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True enough, but in let's say five years, projects will be up to 4K resolution, or maybe even 8K resolution. If you scanned for 8K resolution, right now the projector won't do your scans justice. But in five years?
 

Adrian Bacon

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True enough, but in let's say five years, projects will be up to 4K resolution, or maybe even 8K resolution. If you scanned for 8K resolution, right now the projector won't do your scans justice. But in five years?

nope. 4K won’t even be noticeable. In order to benefit from 4K, you would have to double your display size if everything else remained equal. The funny thing about display resolution, is once you reach the point that you can no longer see individual pixels from a given viewing distance, adding more pixels does not improve the visible image sharpness. You can grow the size of the displayed image and maintain the same sharpness, but jamming more pixels into the same area does nothing once you can’t see the individual pixels any more.

In a projected display environment, unless the audience is sitting close enough that you can see individual pixels at whatever the projected display size is, replacing the projector with a higher resolution projector does nothing unless you either move the audience closer to the projected image (making the image appear larger), or you move the projector back to project a larger image, and even then, you’d basically have to double the projected display size to benefit going from Full HD to 4K. At some point, you can’t make it bigger. The same goes for the HDTV in your house. Buying a crispy new 4K TV does nothing unless you buy one that is twice as big as the one it is replacing, so if you had a 50 inch HDTV, in order to get any benefit from that extra resolution, you’d basically have to replace it with a 100 inch 4K TV, assuming you could actually get any 4K content that really was 4K (meaning captured at higher than 4K resolution and downsampled to 4K), OR, replace it with the same size TV and sit a lot closer to your TV. At some point you can’t sit any closer, and/or can’t make it any bigger without making the wall/room larger.

For display environments, the sweet spot is Full HD/2K, and will be for quite some time to come. You may not realize this, but the vast majority of movie houses have converted over all of their systems to digital projectors over the last 5-10 years. Guess what resolution a lot of those projectors are? The smaller screens are 720p, the medium to large screens are 2K, or FullHD, and the really big screens are maybe 4K, but usually 2K/FullHD. Those projected images are indistinguishable from the Blu-ray movie you watch on your big screen HDTV at home even though they’re both similar resolution (assuming the projector was properly set up and in focus). The vast majority of Hollywood movies are mastered at 2K resolution. Yes, they shoot at 4K and up, but that’s so they can oversample and/or reframe the image in post and still have a 2K image that is as sharp as it will get.

fullHD/2K is the point of diminishing returns because the individual pixels are no longer visible in the vast majority of viewing environments. This is why 720p/1080 was selected as the HDTV broadcast standard. It was a 9x jump in resolution over SDTV and was sufficiently high enough resolution in 99.9% of the places it would be seen that they wouldn’t need to make any changes for quite a while. 4K, 8K and all that other stuff is just stuff so that the manufacturers can keep selling you more stuff. It will only lead to a sharper image in certain very specific viewing environments, and our TV rooms are not those environments.

if the OP really wanted future proof, scan it in at 4K or 8K, then down sample it to FullHD. You’ll have an amazingly sharp and detailed FullHD image that upscales wonderfully to any future display standards without losing much if any sharpness, and it’ll still be a small and tidy file.
 
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