V500: Best Rez for MF?

[remegius]

I've been doing a little experimenting scanning 120 files with my Epson V500, and I'm interested in what most folks use as a scanning resolution for their final scans. Here I'm talking about scanning for printing, not for the web. At 1600 dpi the files end up at somewhere around 3500x3500, which translates to a 12 MP file. At 3200 dpi the files are around 7100x7100 (50 MP), which seems little like overkill. Anyway, I'd like to here how others scan their 120 negs with the V500.

Cheers...

Rem

 

[Gerry M]

I have settled on 2400 dpi, tiff files. 6X6 aren't too big, 6X7 are OK and 6X9 are very big. Makes my PC grunt and groan. QTR likes these files. This seems to be working for me, anyway. A warning tho, I really don't know what I am doing 🙂.
Gerry

 

[mcgrattan]

I scan at 3200. However, I usually sharpen and then downsize a little. It depends a little on the negative, too. I always downsample the 6x9s, but 6x4.5s I sometimes just sharpen and leave at 3200.

 

[wayneb]

It depends on your printer or photo shop that is printing. I've asked at the various photo shops that print. One will take .tiffs @ 400dpi. That seems low, but if you give them 1200dpi, I'm not sure the downsampling will improve the results.

 

[Steveh]

I did quite a bit of research on this when I got my V500 a few weeks ago, and the (internet!) consensus seems to be that 2400 is the highest setting worth using because that's the maximum optical resolution of the scanner, so higher settings get you more pixels but no more "real" quality. I did a couple of fairly unscientific tests that seemed to bear that out, so I stick with 2400, which still produces pretty chunky tiffs. Also one thing I learned to my cost was not to touch jpegs or any of the sharpening/grain reduction settings - getting rid of those and just outputting untweaked Tiffs seems to have much more impact on output quality at normal print sizes.