Quote Originally Posted by percepts View Post
So I won't be buying a 4990 then. What's the SNR on a drum scanner?
It's not scanner-limited; grain limits SNR too. If you have grain that causes a 5 unit variation in a flat color area, it's the film itself which has a low SNR and which is bringing your effective bit rate below 6 bits / channel. So it will happen with any scanner.

Please god, will someone with a drum scanner please scan the same file twice, at 8 and 16 bit and run this workflow?

I know I'm going against the collective wisdom of the ages here, but the collective wisdom is wrong.