On Thu, 18 Apr 2002 23:05:00 -0500 Joe Tait (jtait@texas.net) wrote:
> That being the case, amongst good CCD scanners, are there particular ones
> that convert to B&W significantly better?
There's no unique requirements for scanning B&W neg, any CCD scanner can do
it, either scanning as greyscale or RGB.
Things to watch out for are
- sufficient scanner ODR to cope with the often extreme range of silver
densities in a B&W neg. Whether this will ever be a problem depends on your
development. I like quite delicate negs which print best on hard paper, if
you are the sort of person who devs for negs to print on G1 in a cold
cathode head, you are going to find scanning much more difficult.
- grain aliasing can be a completely devastating problem with
non-chromagenic B&W, thanks to the sharp grain boundaries and grain sizes
of metallic silver. Whether you hit this problem will depend on the
interaction between the scanner you use and the film+dev type and extent of
exposure and development. It will occur to some extent (minor to appalling)
with all CCD scanners on some materials, but the higher the pixel
resolution the less problematic it will be. Trial and error, I'm afraid.
This may be a reason to avoid the Nikons with LED lightsources, as the
collimated lightsource accentuates the problem.
Regards
Tony Sleep
- Online portfolio & exhibit; + film scanner info
& comparisons
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