Now, our German friend may have access to a Nikon 9000(running $4000 used on eBay), or a 5-25,000 dollar drum scanner(also found used on eBay) for comparison. Both limited by the granularity of the film, and the lower resolution of paper(whatever that is). That is to say, that it is scanning in at a higher resolution to digital, than I am able to produce by wet printing. I don't know what the resolution of Ilford paper is, but I assure you that with my measly little Beseler enlarger, it does not have the resolution of the 6400 scans I have tested with the V500. And even when making the leap from that negative to paper. That is to say, that given any random film negative material that there is only so much grain which can be captured. If a $160 scanner can mean that my darkroom trash can only fills up half as fast as it normally does, it is a huge savings to me.įrom just skimming that that first page, I would bet you lunch at your favorite restaurant that it is written by a German.Īnyway, without researching this further, I will assume that there is a diminishing returns value(that our German reviewer does not acknowledge). It's a savings in time, in set up, materials cost, and clean up. Scanning them and working on them in PS gives me a good idea of whether or not they are worth the effort, and gives me a good idea of what I need to work on at the enlarger. I am not going to buy a scanner the price of a used car, or a new digital camera to scan film and print it. They are scanning in at 200 times the data than is needed. PNet allows 700px by 700px images(which is a nominal web size), and my scans are coming in at 14,000+ per side. The scanned file sizes are huge at full scan. I did not mean that scans of '120 are pretty good for the web' they way that you are replying. I am going to wet print them if they are going to be printed.

I have no interest in, or need to, printing scanned negatives.

I would even bet that you could see film grain, long before you see scan lines. I don't know, but I doubt it without testing, I would assume that a 35 negative scanned at high settings would output rather well to a 300 dpi 8x10 lab print. If you are blowing the 35 up to same size print as the 120, your 8.5x11 for example, you may be seeing differences.

Epson perfection v500 photo scanner