Fuji 6X9 scans on Epson 4990

[Bill Jaynes]

I'm working with a friend who shoots a Fuji 6X9 wide and has made terrific C prints up to 20X30 with negatives of Agfa Optima. He's beginning to scan the negs with an Epson 4990 and, from the start, they are very "grainy" (cloudy) and, even at 4800 dpi, don't hold up well even at 11X14". Last night we ran some tests: 4800 dpi, no filtration in the scanner (grain reduction, scratch removal, ICE etc) and target size, original. The results, when sized to, say, 300 dpi are quite "grainy" and fully hideous at 100% view. All he wants is to produce a 15X30" print on a 4800. Our sense is that these scans are barely 15% the quality of his C prints. I know that people here would suggest a better scanner but, shouldn't there be some fairly useable quality from a 4990?
Not sure if this is the right forum for this content.
Bill

[pfigen]

Most color neg films can only support up to somewhere between 1600 and 2000 dpi. Scanning at a higher resolution will only overemphasize the grain, which tends in that direction already. Try scanning at 1600 dpi and rezzing  up from there. Better to have variable apertures to match to grain size, but that doesn't exist in flatbeds.

[Ray]

I'm working with a friend who shoots a Fuji 6X9 wide and has made terrific C prints up to 20X30 with negatives of Agfa Optima. [a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=124137\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You don't mention what ISO this Agfa Optima is. ISO 400 tends to be very grainy. I've recently done a bit of scanning of old B&W film that is very grainy; much more grainy than Kodachrome 64 slides, for example. It's not always clear to me what film type I'm scanning, but sometimes the name appears on a particular strip, such as Kodak Tri-X or Panatomic X.

Before printing I'll usually run the image through Neat Image to remove as much grain as possible without seriously degrading resolution. This usually involves setting high frequency noise removal to either 50% or zero.

You'd have to do a lot of experimentation to determine which is better, scanning at a lower resolution to lose the grain, or scraping every last bit of detail off the film and then using some noise reduction program as appropriate.

[Bill Jaynes]

Hi Ray,

"You don't mention what ISO this Agfa Optima is. "

This film is ISO 100 and probably fairly dense.

"Before printing I'll usually run the image through Neat Image to remove as much grain as possible without seriously degrading resolution. This usually involves setting high frequency noise removal to either 50% or zero."

We're going to try Neat Image today and your suggestions are really helpful since they give us some targets to go towards. Comment below; good, thanks.

"You'd have to do a lot of experimentation to determine which is better, scanning at a lower resolution to lose the grain, or scraping every last bit of detail off the film and then using some noise reduction program as appropriate."

Bill