Originally Posted by
interneg
It's bereft of what matters - real sharpness. Fine detail is resolved to one extent or another, but it is not really sharp - ie there's some resolution but it's aberrated to the point of being unrecoverable in a convincing way. Fundamentally, it'll make a print look 'soft' & no amount of sharpening will help that - especially if it was sat alongside a print originated from a better scanner. It will show up in print, even at very small enlargements. BTDT. That image should be razor sharp at the size you've posted it at. Furthermore, those broken up, aliased highlights are highly characteristic of Epson scans & are symptomatic of wildly insufficient dmax that begins to fail in the very low 2.0's - if that. The wall below the clockface sticks out like a sore thumb because of this problem with the highlights.
More to the point, those high pixel density screens you vaunt so much barely reach 2/3 of the resolution of an average inkjet print & a little over 50% of the resolution of a Lambda or similar. Just to make it clear, a 4K television is not a substitute for a decent graphics monitor & that's even more the case if we're comparing with a 4K+ graphics monitor. Again, BTDT.
Finally, I've scanned plenty of stuff shot with a Nikkor 50/1.8 - the level of aberration in your images seems atypical (when it appears in a known good example, it's mostly out towards the edges) & I've scanned CMS20 - yes it will show up some spherical aberration in optics, but at a much lesser scale (& I mean much less). The fact that it's all over the image in that way is not characteristic of a 50/1.8 in good working order. Most of that aberration is more likely scanner lens artefacts, or dirty flatbed glass covered in out-gassing from the plastic shell of the scanner. Note that it 'blooms' around the highlights - which is usually indicative of a cheap (or dirty) scanner optic.
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