[filmscanners] Re: Pixels and Prints

["David J. Littleboy" <davidjl@gol.com>]

"Austin Franklin" <austin@darkroom.com> writes:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> Then there's the reality check of actually looking at film scans and
> actually looking at some digital camera images and seeing how
> they compare.
>
> If one actually did that, one would see that, on a pixel-for-pixel basis
> (that is, comparing the same number of pixels), film scans are incredibly
> poor, being soft and noisy. As I mentioned before, downsampling 4000 dpi
> scans of Fuji "100F" slides to 60% results in images that are beginning to
> be similar quality to digital camera originals.

That depends on a LOT of things.  The film, the development and the scanner.
I have seen extreme differences between high end film, excellent
exposure/development and using a very good scanner...much less a high end
scanner...vs...most decent films scanned on a con/prosumer based scanner.

I have compared scans from my scanner (Leaf45, which scans 35mm at 5080) and
different digital cameras (Leaf Lumina, which is a TRUE RGB digital camera
in that it gives %100 of the color information per pixel...as well as D30,
D60, Hasselblad digital backs etc.  The ONLY digital cameras that come close
to my best film scans are the 7k x 7k Hasselblad scanning back (which
actually beats most film, but is useless in the real world only in the
studio) and the Lumina comes close, but not quite (which is a 2k x 3k
scanning camera).
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

I think you've misunderstood what I've said. Take a 900 x 900 pixel crop
from your 5080 dpi scan and print it at 3x3 inches. Take a 900x900 crop from
a 10D image and print it at 3x3 inches. Which looks better?

Since that's a 16x enlargement from film, it's going to look pretty poor.
But 10D images look very good printed at 300 dpi.

So the argument that scanned pixels are, on an individual basis, in any way
better than 10D pixels, strikes me as seriously problematic.

David J. Littleboy
davidjl@gol.com
Tokyo, Japan


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