For the old V800 scanner, using the eyedropper with a 5x5 average box on the unadjusted scan, I see about 9% difference between the light and dark areas. As you can see, it is really obvious in unadjusted photos. You can't have your sky looking like this:
Attachment 222924
For the new V850 scanner, it is a lot better. I see 4% difference between light and dark areas when looking at the unadjusted original, which is tolerable as long as I don't use dehaze or clarity:
By scanning the maximum available area of the 8x10 with the higher-res camera that crops the edges out, the variance drops to 2%, which is nearly undetectable. This explains why I never noticed before: within the area of a 4x5 negative, the variance is just 1% and likely below that when you just look at the sky area of a photo.
The thing is that I do often boost the clouds with "dehaze" and sharpen with "clarity." I assume that's pretty normal in a hybrid film-digital workflow? Maybe people are doing DSLR scans for 8x10? I also can't quite fit the film borders in the scan area and I see a lot of film borders in other people's 8x10 scans. Maybe those are scans of contact prints?
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