
Originally Posted by
Peter De Smidt
Related a bit to rdeloe'a comment, one interesting thing related to scanning is the effect on grain size. Before someone feels the need to point this out, I'm referring to photographic grain, the appearance of granularity in a standard photo print. I'm not referring to grains of silver, which are much, much smaller. Anyway, the appearance of grain depends how how the film inherently is, as well as how it's scanned. People talk about grain aliasing and hard/soft light sources, and maybe that's it, but whatever the explanation, some scanning systems really exaggerate film grain more than others. For example, I had a Nikon Coolscan V. It was a very good 35mm film scanner, at least with fine-grained film. But with grainy film, say, Bergger 200 or HIE, it wasn't as good as my Canoscan 9950F, a consumer desktop scanner. The grain with the Nikon with those films was massive. It clearly limited system resolution. With the 9950f, those films had much finer grain but also more subject detail. Moving on to today, with 35mm film I scan at 6000spi with my Cezanne, not because I get more subject detail, but because I get the finest appearance of grain. It's not that I don't like grain, at least with some pictures. I'm just pointing out that some systems increase apparent grain size more than others.
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