I noticed a marked improvement by wet mounting my 5x7, fp-4+ negative on the glass platen of the MT 1800f. Silverfast, 1800 PPI, 48 bit positive, green channel and 8x samples. Roughly a 550 MB image and 22x33 inch at 360dpi.

There was a very small improvement in sharpness in the raw scans but the big improvement came in the sky area. Not as much "grain" visable. I use the word grain loosely as I'm not sure that it is grain that I'm seeing at 1800ppi, scan resolution. Nevertheless the sky is much smoother overall, no Newton rings, hardly any dust but a few air bells.

I have found that I could sharpen more aggresively without the sky becoming "noisy" and then using Noise Ninja there was this WOW factor. As I noted above, there was a noticable improvement sharpness wise in other areas of the scan but one has to compare scans ,with and without fluid mounting side by side to see the difference.

Aztec has a short video on wet mounting. I copied their procedure. Except I used heavy mineral oil. I could not find light Mineral oil, I don,t know if it is made. But I'd use it instead.

Basically it is ; Glass platten, oil, film, oil, mylar. I did not use any tape but spead the oil from the center of the mylar/negative sandwich out to the edges, pushing the air out from the negative at the same time. Take the time to make sure all components are as clean & dust free as possible and that the calibration window on the glass platten is spotless.

I was lucky, the local printer gave me a sheet of 4mil ( .004" ) Mylar. This stuff ain't cheap.

Clean up with dish detergent and water. Then a bit of distilled water and photo flow for both the neg and Mylar.

It is worth the extra effort.

I want to thank all of the previous posters on scanning/wet mounting in this forum for doing all of the hard work. It made my effort go very smoothly.

Thanks, Richard Martel