[filmscanners] RE: HP PhotsSmart - questions

["Laurie Solomon" <laurie@advancenet.net>]

I looked at the web site you gave the link for; it was not clear from its
contents as to what the unit's native optical resolution is.  If the native
optical resolution is 150 dpi and the other resolutions are all
interpolations, that might account for the reason that the 150 is sharper
than the 300 dpi.  Moreover, the screen resolution might also enter into the
equation since the screen rendering of the image will be such as to make the
300 dpi scan be rendered on the monitor at twice the size as the 150 dpi
scan which can result it some apparent fuzziness with the smaller rendering
appearing sharper even at lower resolutions.

The standard rule of thumb sage advice is to scan at the scanners optical
resolution and not at an interpolated resolution to get the maximum
sharpness and the minimum flaws, artifacts, and noise.

But you have me a little confused.  You speak of scanning a 3x5 print; but
then you say you also had this negative roll scanned at Target.  Are we
talking about positive paper prints or film negatives?  They are two very
different things.

Unless you will be enlarging a hard copy print to a print size larger then
the original or a portion of a cropped print to the size of the entire
original print or larger, a 300 dpi is sufficient since hard copy prints
typically do not yield resolutions greater then 300 dpi since the
information is not there in the original to support a higher resolution with
actual original data.  To scan 35mm film, one will normally scan it at a
resolution of around 4000 dpi since the frames will typically be enlarged to
at least 3.5 X so as to produce a 3.5 X 5 image at around 300 dpi.  A 1200
dpi scan of a 35mm film frame is a relatively low resolution to be scanning
35mm at and would require interpolation in the event that one wanted to
enlarge the image in its entirety or in part.  Thus, Target is really not
doing any better than your machine would do on a 35mm film frame. Moreover,
we do not know if the 1200 dpi that Target scans at is real optical
resolution or interpolated resolution.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of Rich Koziol
> Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2005 1:01 PM
> To: laurie@advancenet.net
> Subject: [filmscanners] Re: HP PhotsSmart - questions
>
> On 6 Aug 2005 at 12:06, Laurie Solomon wrote:
>
> > As for the question of " why 150 dpi appears sharper than
> 300 dpi when
> > scanning a 3 x 5 color print," you did not tell us if the
> result you
> > speak of was on the monitor or on a hard copy print
>
> At this point I'm just looking at the results on a 19inch monitor.
> Used the HP software to scan with.
>
> I also had this negative roll scanned at Target, for comparison.
> Target offers 1200dpi scans for about $4/roll.  They just
> started this service and are still somewhat sloppy with film handling.
>
> Rich
>
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