After many games of ping-pong in my head about where/how to get my 6x7 negatives processed, I finally decided to bite the bullet and take a few rolls (not all, because it’s so darn expensive) to my nearest pro lab, Apertures Photo. I had them processed and scanned to a CD. It was something like $5/roll for processing, $5/roll for scanning, and $6 for the CD itself. The images produced by their Noritsu lab were about 5MP, 8-bit jpegs. Not the greatest quality or even usable for anything other than proofing or posting on the web, but I guess this is the digital counterpart to the old light table. The images actually looked decent though they were a little noisy and couldn’t be manipulated much on a computer. I was quite happy with most of the black and white shots (Fuji Neopan 400). Great tonality, range, and sharpness, but noticeably grainy. The color shots were all expired Fuji Superia 400, a cheap consumerr-quality film that had been sitting in my freezer for a couple of years. I was not terribly impressed with the color of the Superia or anything else about it for that matter, except that it seemed to have adequate sharpness (and that was shooting wide-open, handheld).
Well I decided I really like two of the shots I’d had processed so far, so I took them a step further. I brought those two negatives back to Apertures for a 4000 DPI scan on their Nikon 8000 film scanner. The files produced here were just enormous: 270 MB TIFF files, approximately 85 MP. My little Macbook had trouble opening each of them in Lightroom, lots of spinning pinwheels happening that day. The resolution on these files was obviously supreme, but I think a bit overstated by the technical specs of the files. I think the real resolution was probably somewhere around half of the stated 4000 DPI. And the other problem is that I’m still getting 8-bit files. So far my opinion on film scanning: why would you give up the dynamic range of the film by compressing bit-depth like that? I’d like to have a 16-bit file that’s about 2400 DPI. That would be perfect I should think. Now if I can find a lab that’ll accomodate without costing me an arm and a leg.
Click here to see some of the results (as well as old film shots).
