The late Ted Harris was of the opinion that fluid mounting was usually not necesssary with professional flatbed scanners. Ted used a Cezanne Elite and an IQSmart. I agree with this, except for very large magnifications, and am attaching some samples of a recent test I made with my EverSmart Pro scanner. One view is of the entire scene of the Cementerio of Cee, in Galicia. On the far right I put a rectangular black box to mark the position of the two crops. The box would be about .3" wide on the 7" wide negative (original is 5X7"). So when you look at the crops on your screen just multiply the width as you see it by 24 and that would be about the actual size of the image at that magnification. For example, on my screen the crops are about 12" wide, which would correspond to a print of about 280" wide at the magnification.

One of the crops is of a scan with the negative placed directly on the scanner glass, the other is with the negative fluid mounted to the scanner glass. The EverSmart is a focusing scanner so the plane of focus should be perfect and is not an issue.

I believe the fluid mounted crop has slightly tighter grain than the dry mount one, but is equally sharp. Question is, does anyone believe that the small improvement in quality is worth the trouble of fluid mounting?

BTW, this is a TMY negative developed in Pyrocat-HD. The old TMY, not the new stuff. Lens was 240mm Fuji A, at f/22. The scan was done at 3175 spi.

Sandy King