Well, I've said this before: one is Neat, the other, Keen.
On the positive side: when I got my first film scanner, I thought I'd struck gold in terms of dealing with slides. Before, there was the tedium, and, ultimately, dissatisfaction with creating internegs (PITA process in general, and the generational/detail loss inherent in adding an additional link in the print-making process). The only alternative was either Cibachrome/Ilfochrome (gorgeous when you got it right, too much contrast-craziness when things went wrong; until a lower-contrast Ilfochrome was made available, you had to create your own contrast masks to handle this), or Kodak's ill-fated (swear-to-Dog, I almost wrote "ill-faded", which indeed was part of the problem!) Type-R system that competed with Cibachrome. (There was also Kodak's shorter-lived "Instant" printing system, but we won't go there; somewhere in a box, Dorian Gray-like, sit several attempts at coming to grips with that system). That first scanner, together with my first photo-quality printer (Epson SP 1200), meant Good-Bye to All That.
With a proper (5000°K) light box, you'll know, without a doubt, what the scanned image should look like. Armed with a good loupe (or, failing that, slide projector), editing can be a tad easier, too.
Another interesting observation: at least with my film scanner (Minolta 5400, 1st-gen), slides scan somewhat faster than color negs, even with ICE engaged. I'd been told by someone, somewhere, that the extra bit of time it takes to scan a color neg is chalked up to the process of dealing with the orange mask.
On the (ahem) negative side: better handling of highlights, obviously. I tend not to be a big fan of constant bracketing, and while advanced camera metering technology over the years meant I was already bracketing less when shooting slides, I next to never felt the need to bracket shooting color neg, meaning less film unnecessarily burned up. Having a film scanner also meant having an easier time dealing with negs, too: at first, I still went for getting small prints and proofs done by the lab when getting my film processed; after a short while, I started turning out prints that were better than the best labs I'd been dealing with. Getting color-neg film souped was a good deal faster and easier than getting slide film done, and in more places (which is even more the case now), but by this time the photo agency where I was working had decided to take their color-neg processing in-house, putting me in charge. That was the last time I saw the inside of a photo lab for any C41 work for a number of years. I learned more about the process than I ultimately cared to know. 😉
Now, I can either take the film to a good pro lab (which I still do, depending on the project), or go down the block to the minilab in the local Rite-Aid and get the film done, often in under an hour, for about $2.50 a pop, uncut and sans prints (or scratches...maybe I'm just lucky). I cut the roll up into strips of six, and either lay the entire roll (or two...there's enough room) on the UMAX tabloid flatbed to make a digital contact sheet, or fire up the Minolta, load up several neg holders, and run a fast set of small scans for on-screen evaluation. A bit more involved than dealing with slides, but hardly enough to be irritating. I don't shoot a lot of slide film anymore, but then again, I shot nothing but slide film for the first handful of years I got serious about all this picture-taking stuff; if I never shot another roll of slide film again, I still have an avalanche of the stuff to scan. But color neg (when I'm not shooting black-and-white neg, that is) is where it's at.
- Barrett
(P.S. As usual, dmr can tell you the same thing, with greater, er, economy. 🙂)
