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Thread: Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

  1. #11

    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    Yes, this is from a 4x5 negative that Ed sent to me.

    I used the 4x5 negative holder.

    I will have to check tomorrow to see if I put negatives in emulsion up or down. I did some tests early on, marked the carrier, and frankly no longer remember what I do.

    I picked the red channel because Ed asked me to make the choice that would give highest resolution, and in my tests, that's the red channel. It's interesting that your tests show the green channel sharpest in your 1800f - if I am remembering correctly, the green channel is *least* sharp in my 1800f.

    Hopefully Ed will weigh in with a response on Vuescan and sharpening. I haven't tried that software myself, although after corresponding with Ed, trying it is on my long, long, long list of things to check out. I agree that even when you specify no sharpening the Imacon software sharpens the bejeebers out of things.

  2. #12

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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    The nice thing about Vuescan is that it really does what it claims, and gives you more control of the scanner than any other program. It also got a lot better for the Canon over the past 4 months. Earlier versions of vuescan had some problems, but Ed Hamrick keeps tuning it so you get a new version every couple of weeks with fixes for various scanners.

    I ran a series of tests to make sure it was not sharpening, starting with the raw output of the scanner and post processing that myself, then comparing it back to the adjusted output from the scanner. Kirk - what software did you use for those 4 9960s? The banding can be a software artifact as well as a scanner problem. The Canon software is not very good for 4x5. I also limit the processing that the scanner does to limit possible artifacts, i.e., I do not try to optimize the scan, I just try to get the data out.

    As for grain - that gets us into the interesting problem of the film you use for scanning. Tmax 100 in Xtol 1:3 is so smooth and the grain is so small that there is no chance you are going to resolve the grain with a consumer scanner. This might be the answer to the sky issue - the smoother the sky, the fewer the artifacts the scanner will generate. The most artifacts occur when the grain is right at the scanner resolution limit, so a little more grain might be worse than a lot more grain.

    What Paul and I have focused on is the whole workflow - how do you get the best negative for scanning, not how do you get the best scan of whatever you have been shooting in the past. Paul was an established silver printer and I will defer to his explanation of his views on this. For me, I quit shooting 4x5 15 years ago and only got back to it this spring, so I was starting from scratch. I had been shooting with a DSLR and scanning 35mm film, so I had an idea of what would make a good scan.

    I tried some traditional film first - Bregger 200 - and the scans were nasty, so I went to Tmax because the emulsion was designed to have maxium smoothness and limited grain. I did not care about any of the "Tri-x look" sort of stuff, because while I like the look of Tri-x, that is on silver and is irrelevant to scanning. What you need for a scan is a good representation of the dynamic range of the light, but you do not need to worry about whether it fits paper. I have no idea whether my negatives would print on silver. A few of the best were mistakes - I grossly over exposed some film of a very high contrast scene with a white building. I got a very dense negative which I am sure would not print very well (maybe with an alt process), but it scanned fine.

    The real issue is what is good enough from a scan. Staring at pixels on a screen is not a good way to evaluate a scan, neither is printing a raw file without processing. While it would be better if the scanner did not create subtle artifacts in the sky (if it does), a little blur will smooth that right out. AA's real skill was in the darkroom, his negatives are not very sharp by modern standards. When I look at the large format images I like, only a few depend on ultimate sharpness for their allure. We also have to accept that digital prints are not silver prints - sharp means something different with ink on paper than with silver and optical printing.

    Print size also matters - 20 x 24 seems to me that it might be big enough to do everything you want to do with LF, and consumer level scans might be good enough for that, with a good workflow. If you need bigger prints and sharper images for your vision, a drum scan is in your future, or an 8x10. If money was not an issue, I would have everything drum scanned. But having shot more than 100 sheets of Katrina damage over the past month, that would buy me a new car.:-) Here are couple of quick jpgs for fun: biotech.law.lsu.edu/katrina/ I kept them small, so there are artifacts.

    I think we spend way too much time worrying about the input and not enough about our digital processing skills and the output. Look at what this guy does with 35mm black and white:

    www.petemyers.com

  3. #13
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    "Kirk - what software did you use for those 4 9960s? The banding can be a software artifact as well as a scanner problem. " I used the Canoscan software. I was definitely not impressed with Vuescan at that time. Maybe it is time to try it again. This was just as the scanner came on the market.

    "Tmax 100 in Xtol 1:3 is so smooth and the grain is so small that there is no chance you are going to resolve the grain with a consumer scanner." Not true I have no problem doing this with either the 4990 0r 1800f. Some of the prints in my current show are T-Max 100 in numerous developers.

    The thing is I know what a good scan is and how a mediocre scan can make your life more difficult. I figured this out the hard way. I spent the last two years making prints for my current retropective show. I have gotten pretty good at this and even teach it at the university level. As I have written many times. Almost any scanner can give you a descent 11x14 with a good work flow but will not make a 16x20 that holds large format quality. That is the quality barrier. From a large format point of view these scanners barely give an adequate 16x20 where even an Imacon scan at 16x20 will show a real difference.

    As for Pete Myers. I can tell nothing about his print quality from a website. I do think it is a little humorous to refer to yourself (as he does) though as "one of the most gifted Master Fine Arts Photographers of our times." A google of his name shows up only his website. He lives in Santa Fe. I have lived in New Mexico all my life and been an active fine arts photographerhere since 1970. I live an hour from Santa Fe and I have never heard of him.
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  4. #14

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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    > "Tmax 100 in Xtol 1:3 is so smooth and the grain is so small that there is no chance you are going to resolve the grain with a consumer scanner." Not true I have no problem doing this with either the 4990 0r 1800f. Some of the prints in my current show are T-Max 100 in numerous developers.

    Maybe the question here is whether your various developers or your use of them are producing bigger grain, and that is leading to grain aliasing and blasting your scans. You should not be resolving grain in Tmax 100 with the 1800, it should be below the resolution threshold. I cannot speak to the 4990, but I do not resolve it with the 9950. You are an accomplished traditional printer and I assume you are scanning negatives you shot with silver in mind - have you changed your processing and shooting since you started scanning, or are you trying to get good scans of silver printing negatives? As the tri-x look reminds us, grain can increase the illusion of sharpness in silver but it just screws up scanning. (It is also the silver version of digital oversharpening, IMHO.)

    As for Vuescan, I would try it again without delay. I am not surprised that you sent the scanners back if you used the canon software. If I had not already been using vuescan, I would have sent mine back, and that was when vuescan was not working so well. That said, I think Silverfast will do as well as vuescan if you output the HDR file and post process it yourself. I do not have as much faith in the internal image processing in Silverfast, but that could because I never spent enough time with it.

  5. #15
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    I will post an example of the banding. I don't know if a down resed file will show it.

    Also lok at my posting here http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/503992.html

    Is that not grain? That is FP4. I can show you an example with T-Max.
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  6. #16
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    banding in direction of scan path (long dimension) in 9950. This was one of the better ones and that is why I still have it, because I didn't think the client would notice. But this is not acceptable to me so I rejected 4 of these scanners before I gave up and demanded a refund.

    http://www.gittingsphoto.com/Articles/HR%20PRES%2003%20crop.jpg

    and full image:

    http://www.gittingsphoto.com/Articles/HR%20PRES%2003.jpg
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  7. #17

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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    Kirk,

    You will get no argument from me about the problems with the 9950 with the CANON software. It will not even do a 4800 bit scan at 16 bits on black and white for 4x5, so you cannot even get a basic scan at 4800 to work with.

    All of my observations have been for black and white. If you want to do color, get the 1800. To get good black and white you need to scan at 4800 and downsample to 2400. You cannot do that with color, at least on a windows machine, because the file is too big for the memory space. It might work fine on a Mac with a lot of ram, or a Linux box.

    The jpg is not working on the link you sent for the grain, but I will trust you that it is grain, or at least grain artifacts. My question is why you have such large grain on Tmax. FP4 I cannot speak to, but I am pretty sure it has larger grain than Tmax 100.

  8. #18
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    Don't you find Vuescan's interface really funky? The only thing comparable is Imacon's which I hate. Imacon should really open up to SF. That would be a great paring.
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  9. #19

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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    > Don't you find Vuescan's interface really funky?

    You have probably not looked at it in a while. It has been polished up a bit and there are new features. To me, it is just a very straight forward interface for an electronic instrument, but then I worked in research labs back when interfaces might involve punched cards and switches. Anything that is on a screen looks good to me.:-)

  10. #20

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    Scanner test results - 9950 v. 1800

    You know the professional film companies like Kodak and Fuji could have made using film much more enticing by investing some money into making a really good, affordable pro scanner (up to 4x5). As it stands now, I get results from my new 5D and scanned 35mm (Minolta 5400) that aren't far behind flatbed scans of larger negs. I really don't have much of a reason to stay with lf film (since all of my prints are done digitally now) unless an affordable solution is produced and I don't see R&D picking up for scanners anytime soon.

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