jlw
Rangefinder camera pedant
We had a thread earlier today involving people shopping for inexpensive flatbed scanners that could do a decent job with medium-format negatives.
I've recently bought a CanoScan 8800 -- the new model with the LED light source instead of fluorescent, which cuts warmup time and is supposed to assure more consistent scans -- so I chimed in with a bit of info about it. But I had to admit I didn't really know much about how its results compared to those of more sophisticated dedicated film scanners.
While I still haven't made a "serious" test, this evening I pulled out an envelope at random (a 1982 performance of the opera Carmen) from the pile of old negatives I'm trying to work through; tried a frame on the 8800; then scanned the same frame with my old 35mm-only Canon FS4000, which in its day was considered a somewhat slow but very sharp scanner. (And at about $1,000 when I bought it, it wasn't cheap, either; the new CanoScan 8800 was about $200.)
So how do they compare? I'm not sure what to think. First, here are almost-full-frame reductions of both scans:
Not a lot of difference, obviously, when reduced to this small size. One is a bit "snappier" than the other, but that's probably down mostly to the settings I used. I'd consider either one satisfactory for web-page postings and whatnot. Both are 8-bit grayscale, single-pass scans with no special techniques or tricks.
Oh, yeah, you probably want to know which is which, don't you? Well, the old FS4000's scan is on the left; the new 8800's is on the right. But again, at this tiny size, there's no real demonstrable difference.
So now let's look at full-frame crops. These were scanned at the scanners' maximum optical resolution: 4000 pixels per inch for the FS4000, 4800 pixels per inch for the 8800:
I'll let the cat out of the bag here and say the old FS4000's scan is the upper one; the 8800's scan is the lower one. And at first glance it might seem to be a no-brainer to say that the FS4000's result is much, much sharper -- as you'd expect from an originally-quite-expensive dedicated film scanner, vs. an inexpensive flatbed scanner.
But wait a second... if I look at the amount of detail in the image -- such as the makeup line under the woman's eye -- vs. simply the sharpness of the grain structure of the image, then I'm not so sure that the "sharper" FS4000 scan really shows any more image detail. It may be that my eye evaluates it as being sharper only because the grain pattern is so exaggerated.
I know from experience that scans of conventional b&w films from the FS4000 suffer drastically from grain aliasing -- a phenomenon in which scanned images appear exaggeratedly grainy (compared to a wet print from the same image) because of the way the edges of the scanner's CCD array interact with the edges of the film's grain pattern.
I'm not sure how much of the extra "sharpness" I think I see in the FS4000 scan is really usable image detail, and how much of it is just aliased grain.
In terms of tonal range and shadow detail, the two scans compare well; if anything, the cheapo 8800 may be a bit better (possibly because, according to its specs, it captures 16 bits of grayscale data, vs. 14 bits for the FS4000.)
So at this point I'm not sure what to think. Since other attributes are similar (except for speed; the USB 2.0 8800 scans much more quickly than the USB 1.0 FS4000) the real tie-breaker is image quality, and I don't know how to interpret my results so far. Is the FS4000 really sharper, or does its scan just look sharper because of the exaggerated grain?
I guess I'll have to do more scans, and make some prints, to pin this down further.
I've recently bought a CanoScan 8800 -- the new model with the LED light source instead of fluorescent, which cuts warmup time and is supposed to assure more consistent scans -- so I chimed in with a bit of info about it. But I had to admit I didn't really know much about how its results compared to those of more sophisticated dedicated film scanners.
While I still haven't made a "serious" test, this evening I pulled out an envelope at random (a 1982 performance of the opera Carmen) from the pile of old negatives I'm trying to work through; tried a frame on the 8800; then scanned the same frame with my old 35mm-only Canon FS4000, which in its day was considered a somewhat slow but very sharp scanner. (And at about $1,000 when I bought it, it wasn't cheap, either; the new CanoScan 8800 was about $200.)
So how do they compare? I'm not sure what to think. First, here are almost-full-frame reductions of both scans:
Not a lot of difference, obviously, when reduced to this small size. One is a bit "snappier" than the other, but that's probably down mostly to the settings I used. I'd consider either one satisfactory for web-page postings and whatnot. Both are 8-bit grayscale, single-pass scans with no special techniques or tricks.
Oh, yeah, you probably want to know which is which, don't you? Well, the old FS4000's scan is on the left; the new 8800's is on the right. But again, at this tiny size, there's no real demonstrable difference.
So now let's look at full-frame crops. These were scanned at the scanners' maximum optical resolution: 4000 pixels per inch for the FS4000, 4800 pixels per inch for the 8800:
I'll let the cat out of the bag here and say the old FS4000's scan is the upper one; the 8800's scan is the lower one. And at first glance it might seem to be a no-brainer to say that the FS4000's result is much, much sharper -- as you'd expect from an originally-quite-expensive dedicated film scanner, vs. an inexpensive flatbed scanner.
But wait a second... if I look at the amount of detail in the image -- such as the makeup line under the woman's eye -- vs. simply the sharpness of the grain structure of the image, then I'm not so sure that the "sharper" FS4000 scan really shows any more image detail. It may be that my eye evaluates it as being sharper only because the grain pattern is so exaggerated.
I know from experience that scans of conventional b&w films from the FS4000 suffer drastically from grain aliasing -- a phenomenon in which scanned images appear exaggeratedly grainy (compared to a wet print from the same image) because of the way the edges of the scanner's CCD array interact with the edges of the film's grain pattern.
I'm not sure how much of the extra "sharpness" I think I see in the FS4000 scan is really usable image detail, and how much of it is just aliased grain.
In terms of tonal range and shadow detail, the two scans compare well; if anything, the cheapo 8800 may be a bit better (possibly because, according to its specs, it captures 16 bits of grayscale data, vs. 14 bits for the FS4000.)
So at this point I'm not sure what to think. Since other attributes are similar (except for speed; the USB 2.0 8800 scans much more quickly than the USB 1.0 FS4000) the real tie-breaker is image quality, and I don't know how to interpret my results so far. Is the FS4000 really sharper, or does its scan just look sharper because of the exaggerated grain?
I guess I'll have to do more scans, and make some prints, to pin this down further.
