slide v. color print: the scanning advantage?

[aad]

If you really want to see the difference, check out Shutterflower's scanner comparison from a while back, if he still has it up. If you have the right scanner, slides scan waaay better than negatives.

 

[boilerdoc2]

Aad is right. A good scanner with a Dmax of ~4.0 is more important than the dpi count. Minolta, nikon, especially do well on slides. Negatives show more grain but still scann very well. Remember that negatives have a greater latitude for exposure than trannies and will look different (not better or worse) than slides.
Steve

 

[Oh Two]

Backwards?

Backwards?

I have MUCH better luck scanning slides, color negatives are full of noise in the shadowed areas. I do pretty well exposing negatives one half stop over but even then I can't get the detail necessary for a really large print. Negatives are very forgiving and the color often garish (Fuji).

Kodachrome is still king, for however long that will last, but I shoot color negatives instead black and white as a matter of habit. When I get my dark room back I'll probably go back to exclusively black and white.

 

[jmilkins]

Interesting discussion thanks folks. As an inexperienced scanner I have had more sucsess with my KM5400 with trannies than negs. The Gallery shots are almost all trannies. I seem to have grain & colour problems with my fav print film - Reala. Thoufgh I 've drecently discovered the remove or reduce grain option in Vuescan that helps...

 

[varjag]

I prefer to scan chromes. It is not that negs are worse/harder, but rather that with chromes there is no issue of color balance. Aside from that tansparencies seem to have better color fidelity and tonal nuances.