Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/09/08

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Film for B&W digital printing ?
From: Henning Wulff <henningw@archiphoto.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 20:26:25 -0700
References: <b02000202-1026-904541A1E24C11D7A764000393D465D8@[10.0.1.2]>

At 3:34 PM -0700 9/8/03, Adam Bridge wrote:
>On 2003-09-08 jerryleh@pacbell.net (Jerry Lehrer) thoughtfully wrote:
>
>>As you may realize, I know nowt about digital scanning, but
>>I would imagine that a silver image should be easier to scan
>>than a dye and silver image such as Kodachrome.  Are scanners
>>set up to primarily scan color negatives?  If so, then a B&W C41
>>would be the film of choice.
>
>Boy, I remember a discussion somewhere, perhaps here, that talked about grain
>aliasing and the type of scanner being used - that the CCD scanners like the
>SuperCoolScan 4000 from Nikon doesn't do as good a job on silver as it does on
>the C41 dye processes.
>
>I'm starting to beleive that although I've not gone to the trouble to find one
>of the good Polaroid scanners. Well, now that I think of it I can't since I
>think they are all SCSI and I no longer have a SCSI adaptor that works for any
>of my computers, having shifted entirely to FireWire.
>
>Is there someone out there who can address this? It might be 
>relevant to Phong.
>
>TCN400 scans really well for me. AND it has the advantage that scratch removal
>software works just fine with it while it doesn't with silver films.
>
>Adam

The Polaroid 4000+ was the later firewire version of the same 
scanner. Microtek still sells it as the 4000tf, but then you have to 
deal with Microtek :-(, but it comes with Silverscan AI and. 
Preliminary reports of the Minolta 5400 look promising for B&W and it 
is approximately the same price as the Microtek. Both are supported 
by Vuescan.

The Nikon LS-30 and LS-2000 were particularly poor with regard to 
grain aliasing; the 8000 is a lot better, especially if you scan in 
colour and desaturate. The 4000 apparently falls in between, although 
I have not tried it.

The reason for the 8000 being better seems to be due to the fact that 
it uses 3 rows of LED's to do the scanning, and thus there is some 
anti-aliasing due to the information coming from three different 
sources. This advantage is negated when you do single-line scanning, 
as can be selected in the 8000 software.

- -- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com
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In reply to: Message from Adam Bridge <abridge@mac.com> (Re: [Leica] Film for B&W digital printing ?)