Quote Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings View Post
What is the chemical mechanism where one gets more pronounced grain (and what appears to be sharper grain in the Xtol example) AND less sharpness in the DETAILS of the letter image? This seems counter intuitive me.
Kirk, the grain in the xtol is not sharper, just bigger. It's sharper look in this post is a product of down sampling/grain size/ scanning resolution being close to multiple of each other.

I'm trying not to get in the subject but I think the big difference here is stain vs not stain. The scattered light in the Nikon sort of amplifies the effect. IMO, the stain reduces a lot of the dispersion and diffraction occurring around the “clean” grain and reaching the neighbor cells in the CCD.
Armando