You don't have enough experience to make a decision. You'll need to put some film through your camera and your process before you can possibly know enough to make a decision.Originally Posted by rpagliari
That said, you've got to start somewhere. So pick one and start. You can always change later.
It's not like your first 5x4 film is going to make an award-winning 50x40 print. Even if most of us think that's going to be the case. I know I did. Every shot.
Yeah, well, small format isn't large format. This is sorta like trying to compare trumpet with clarinet. Surprisingly little of your years of clarinet will apply to trumpet. Your ability to read music, some ability to play with others and understand a director. But you'll find that LF doesn't play like SF. Just doesn't. Which is again why you need to burn a lot of film learning your new LF camera and your process.
LF typically involves less enlargement than smaller formats. So the graininess doesn't get enlarged so much, and is therefore less visible. Doesn't mean the graininess isn't there. Just that it's not so important.
I see from many of the above replies that the discussion has ranged into "the grain question". Don't hurt me for pointing out some stuff that to me is (now after years of work) completely obvious to me but which many people skip over for whatever reasons. For completeness.
First, film is three dimensional. Second, actual silver grains are really small, as in microscope required. When you use said microscope to look through the film in a single spot, what you'll see in highlight areas (higher density) is a silver grain at one depth in the emulsion tends to "overlap" with other silver grains at other depths in the emulsion. They hardly ever "register" well, so the resulting set of overlapping silver grains is almost always bigger and more oddly shaped than any one of the components. This thing, is called a "grain clump". If you can see it in your image, it's a grain clump, not an actual silver grain. Because no enlarger or scanner can image down to individual silver grains.
Third, your scanner resolution is fixed over your scan (that is, set for the entire image before the scan begins). In the case of a drum scanner, scanning aperture is also set for the entire scan. That is, the scan properties are all deterministic and do not vary across the scan area.
Forth, the system of film grain clumps that make up the image are completely stochastic. This applies to grain clump size, which can cover a huge range of sizes. It also applies to grain clump locations.
Fifth, numbers 3 and 4 together guarantee that you're scanner resolutions and aperture size will never register well with your grain clumps. It's just not going to happen. So you need to disabuse yourself of the whole idea that there's a "correct" scanning resolution or drum scan aperture. Some are better than others for certain purposes, and this will vary from image to image. That's just the laws of physics talking to ya.
Sixth, remember that Callier Effect applies to scanning just like it does to optical enlarging. Light is light. Light (as used in photography anyway) does not penetrate solid silver. So it bounces off in another direction. More density -> more light scatter. More light scatter -> more artifacts. Again, just the laws of physics talking to ya.
Finally, remember the old adage: Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights. This is true of darkroom printing, and it's just as true for scanning.
Add it all up together and it comes down to just this: use just as much film density as required to do the job, and no more.
It took me a decade to learn that stuff and hook it together to make logical sense in my head. And when I put it to practice I could make beautiful scanned huge prints of the rare (very) exposures that merited being printed large. So I know it works.
Do with it what you will.
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