Quote Originally Posted by Pere Casals View Post
When digital minilabs were everywhere they had clear advantage aganist optical minilabs. Digital minilabs allowed easy image enhacement, but C-41 films had to be reengineered to deliver larger clouds to be easy to scan and to prevent cloud aliasing. (softer clouds but "solved" with some digital sharpening)

...Another film kind that may have moved to larger clouds is stock Vision 3, as they have to deliver a DCI.
I think you've got this backwards - bigger clouds equals more aliasing, not less. The solution is age old - finer grain, smaller dye clouds! The variable aperture on some drum scanners is intended to allow a reduction of aliasing by increasing the aperture size to match the clouds/ grain.

From an entirely subjective perspective, having scanned quite a lot of various generations of the 160 speed Kodak C41 films in the last few years from 90s Vericolor to current Portra160 (before anyone asks, all generally was processed close to time of exposure & well stored subsequently - mostly 120 & scanned at the same resolution & without sharpening of any sort) I can offer a few observations. Sharpness-wise, the current Portra 160 is definitely the most immediately perceivably 'sharp' out of the box - as the MTF chart suggests. Resolution-wise, from Vericolor it increases somewhat through the VC/NC Portra era - the NC3 I've scanned is perhaps a fraction higher resolving than the current Portra 160. Grain/ dye cloud aliasing again is worst in the Vericolor, drastically better in the Portras & the current generation seems about the same as the last of the NC's.

The one change in the current generation of Vision3 & C41 films that does seem different to earlier generations is the red component having an MTF response closer to transparency films (to emphasise 'kodak' reds & general colour scheme?). Contra to the received wisdom about ease of scanning, BW & transparencies are easier, even now - as long as you have a scanner with competent Dmax & reasonable manual controls - colour neg is relatively demanding of the operator's abilities to get correct colour. That said, photo engineers generally say that colour neg delivers more accurate colour than transparencies - and if you get Fuji 160s/NS to invert correctly, you see what they mean - it can be boringly, almost digitally 'accurate'!

The current generation of Vision3 50D seems a bit of a joker in the pack with an MTF that seems almost transparency-like - the others seem more 'normal' in their behaviour - unlike Vision2 which attempted to seemingly offer a different film for every possible application. All this is quite astonishing, considering that before the mid-late 1980s, there was pretty much one colour negative film for professional cinema work, latterly rated at 100T, & pushable by a stop or so...

It's also important to remember that ECN-2 films are designed to print to another film, not paper & that DI stages (ie scanning etc) have been commonplace since the 1990s, so claims about Vision3 being optimised for scanning are moot. Indeed, Kodak made negative films specifically for scanning at several points in the last couple of decades - & withdrew them because they weren't popular enough!