120 scanning in the new age

[TJV]

How many of you all digitize, to archive or print large, your 120 negs / slides?

I am wondering, in this day and age, if there is still a realistic quality jump going to medium format film over 35mm slide, considering it's becoming very difficult to find people who actually know what they're doing when it comes to scanning. Film flatness, shadow / highlight clipping, digital "noise," all these things degrade the quality.

Speaking for myself, I'm becoming very frustrated at not being able to squeeze the quality out of my transparencies without spending big dollars on drum scans.

35mm is different because I have a Nikon 5000 scanner, run Vuescan and it's easy to control all the fine points and keep the neg perfectly flat. I love the quality. SOme time ago I migrated to 120 by the way of a Mamiya 7ii and I LOVE the clarity of the slides under a loop but have found it near on impossible to translate that into digital scans. I suppose buying a Nikon 9000 with a glass holder to achieve optimum flatness is the only way for me to go in terms of a home solution.

What are your thoughts?

Is 120 all but dead if considering Cibachrome printing is dead and optical C-Type printing is all but dead also? (at least in New Zealand.)

The only things putting me off from getting the Nikon 9000ED is the price of it AND the fact that 120 film is becoming increasingly hard to come by where I live.

J

 

[vdonovan]

I guess I'm lucky. Not only is there an excellent rental darkroom in my town (Rayko Photo Lab, in San Francisco) but they have a 9000 AND an Imacon to rent by the hour, so I am spoiled for choice.

That said, I prefer to print by hand and only scan if I must, e.g. if I'm making a photo book for someone or a large photo mural. The rental darkroom actually has a HUGE 8x10 enlarger that I've used for photo murals but some I have to do digitally, so I pay the money and sit down and scan.

Many people on this forum swear by the various flatbed scanners. I have not yet tried one, but I plan to.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I have a Nikon 8000, the model that the 9000 replaced. I also have the glass carrier and you must have the glass carrier with those scanners. Yes, it really is the only game in town for scanning 120 unless you buy an Imacon for 10,000+ dollars.

I've scanned over 3000 negatives with mine, 35mm, 645, and 6x6 and I have always been impressed with the quality of scans I get. I use viewscan too.

 

[TJV]

I guess I'm lucky to a point.

I have a V700 scanner and the Betterscanning 120 variable height holder as well as access to a Nikon 8000ED scanner at work. Both do an okay job, the 8000 especially, but without a glass carrier in the Nikon I can't get good sharp scans. Printing 8x10" and below, the V700 is okay, but I wouldn't want to enlarge much larger than that. It just can't pull out the detail that does justice to the 120 format. In short, a 120 scan from the V700 is roughly equivalent to scanning from a 35mm slide with the 5000ED when printed at 8x10", as long as you use sharpening well.

I think the 9000 and the holder is the only option left sub Imacon prices.

If I can scrape a little money together I will probably buy the glass holder only and use it at work to see how it improves things. Then I can see if I need a new Mac or a scanner instead.

I see the specs for the 9000ED include a bit more D-Max specs, compared to the 8000ED. Has anyone tested the two to see how much real world gain this has when scanning darker slides?

I love the process of film, viewing on a light table, scanning etc. I hope to be able to keep using it for personal work for a long time. B&H is a god send in this regard.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I've used both the 8000 and 9000; one of my clients back in New Mexico (where I lived for a while) had a 9000 that I used when scanning her old 120 transparencies. I didn't see any real-world difference, but I didn't use it enough to really know. My feeling is the 8000 is magnificent, but i'd buy a new 9000 if I needed a scanner and had the money just because new = more reliable in my opinion. If I didn't have much money i'd buy another 8000 used....they're half the price of a new 9000. I don't think you lose much if anything with the 8000 except the possible problem of getting a used 8000 that's been abused or worn out (as could happen buying anything used....my 8000 has lasted 6 years with no troubles)

 

[TJV]

I would hazard a guess and say the unit at work has scanned about 300,000 images, easy.

It's been in for repair twice with a total of $1000NZ spent on it, and it originally cost $6000.

It's about seven years old, which is pretty good considering!

How much faster is the 9000? The 8000 is quite slow, especially if you multi-sample.

 

[jslabovitz]

Yes, it really is the only game in town for scanning 120 unless you buy an Imacon for 10,000+ dollars.

Don't write off that Imacon quite so quickly. I found a used Imacon Photo in Portland a couple of months ago, and paid only $1700 for it. It works great. The seller was a pro photographer, had switched to shooting digital, and had bought the Imacon (used) to scan the last of his chromes.

The only caveat is that the older (affordable) Imacons require a bit of care in choosing the right Firewire adaptor. However, I'm using it quite successfully on a MacBook Pro with the latest Leopard, so you don't have to go old school to get good scans.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I would hazard a guess and say the unit at work has scanned about 300,000 images, easy.

It's been in for repair twice with a total of $1000NZ spent on it, and it originally cost $6000.

It's about seven years old, which is pretty good considering!

How much faster is the 9000? The 8000 is quite slow, especially if you multi-sample.

The 8000 is actually quite fast with Viewscan software! Nikon scan sucks, it is slow and buggy, crashes often, and screws up the tonal range of negatives (Nikon scan on the 8000 has a bug where it bunches up the dark tones on negs but not slides). I never multi-sample. I started off using it and got tired of 30 minute scan times so I tried without it and it became faster and I didn't lose a bit of quality scanning negs and the difference with transparencies is so small most won't see it.

Wow, repaired twice? For what? I guess 300,000 images is a lot though. I have scanned 3 or 4 thousand with mine.

 

[TJV]

Some sort of circuitry failure, nothing major, but costly to service none the less. There was a problem with it not accepting the neg holders because a student had forced one it it and some capacitor had a fault causing a lot of digital noise in the scan.

Yeah, 300000 scans is pretty brutal!

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Don't write off that Imacon quite so quickly. I found a used Imacon Photo in Portland a couple of months ago, and paid only $1700 for it. It works great. The seller was a pro photographer, had switched to shooting digital, and had bought the Imacon (used) to scan the last of his chromes.

The only caveat is that the older (affordable) Imacons require a bit of care in choosing the right Firewire adaptor. However, I'm using it quite successfully on a MacBook Pro with the latest Leopard, so you don't have to go old school to get good scans.

You're lucky. I guess I was luckier...someone bought me my Nikon 8000 when they first came out at a cost of $3000. I had developed allergies to chemicals and had to quit doing darkroom printing and a woman who liked my work bought me the scanner so I could continue my project of photographing rural Indiana.

 

[Austerby]

I'm satisfied with my v700 scanning medium format for use on screen and on-line. I haven't got the kit to produce decent digital prints and return to the darkroom if I want to - but even then only up to 16x12.

As I see it the v700 has at last enabled me to use medium format extensively - and I now have 6x4.5, 6x6 and 6x9 cameras all picked up for a song.
If I want the maximum quality then I can pay for a professional scan for that particular image but I've found the v700 quite sufficient.

So, to answer your question, I feel than the emergence of decent quality home scanning has breathed new life into medium format - making it affordable and accessible to a new group of hobbyists who could never justify it in the "good old days".

 

[mfogiel]

Let's put the question in these terms:
Unless you are a darkroom practitioner, scanning is the only way to go with film today.
Nikon CS9000+glass film holder, is the cheapest option to extract meaningful quality from the MF - is it expensive ? - Maybe, but on the other hand, only a few years ago you would have had to pay astronomical sums for Rolleiflexes, Hasselblads and the like, which are available in pristine condition now at 15-20% of their new price - has MF quality gear ever been cheaper??? Just bite the bullet and go for the CS 9000, it is well worth it.

 

[Rhoyle]

I have a Coolscan V and an Epson 4870. The Nikon does an excellent job on 35, but despite its limitations, the 4870 with a 6x6 gives a noticibly better final print in terms of fine detal. The problem is that the shadow detail is not quite as good as the Nikon and, but otherwise it will show the difference between 35 and MF. The Epson 700/750 is lightyears better than my 4870-something to consider.