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Author Topic: Scanned 35mm vs. Digital  (Read 4492 times)

erik hansen

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« on: March 24, 2003, 07:34:01 pm »

it really depends on who you ask and what you are shooting.  some people still think that 35mm film is better than the 1Ds.  i don't understand that.  i would say that the d60 (or 10d) would be MUCH better than 35mm film at 8x12.  what does much better mean?  i don't know.  it's just what i like.  you need to do your own comparison.
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sergio

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #1 on: March 24, 2003, 08:10:23 pm »

There is abundant information on this website on the subject.
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Ray

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2003, 07:00:58 pm »

Quote
To arrive at the kind of quality one would get with medium or large format, I'm now experimenting with stitching several digital 'negs' together to arrive at a large final print that suits my quality criteria. I would welcome thoughts on this as I'm just starting out in digital (with a D100 for the moment).
Not sure what range of shift lenses Nikon produce, but Canon have a 24mm, 40mm and 90mm. I have just the 90mm. They're expensive, but these lenses are ideal for stitching purposes - within their shift range. They produce significantly less parallax error compared with a rotating tripod head (for practical purposes with a good stitching program, virtually none) and the overlapping areas of the images are totally free of resolution and light fall-off. I wish I could afford the other two lenses.
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azo_man

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #3 on: March 24, 2003, 07:07:55 pm »

Has anyone compared and are there downloadable comparisons of 6MP DSLR with scanned 35mm?  I know that DSLR looks better for 10x15 and larger output.  What I want to know is how great of a difference do you see at 8x12?  Digital process or not, greater than 8x enlargment is a tough to do.  At those size constraints, is 35mm still out classed and if so by how much?

thanks,
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Ray

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #4 on: March 24, 2003, 07:51:09 pm »

There's a quality of transparency about digital images which, in my view, makes them look better than scanned film of comparable resolution. It's a bit like looking through a clear window as opposed to one that's covered with a fly screen.
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FB

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2003, 11:10:21 am »

This is an issue that is of great concern to me. I come out of a large format darkroom background so image quality is of high inmportance. But the language used to describe that spans the history of photography; namely, sharpness, full detail and fullness of tonal range. Digital has the advantage of relatively lower noise than film, but what I have found is that digital most closely resembles slide film in its senstivity to high values although it has an amazing ability to capture low values better than film. Nevertheless, a properly scanned negative will produce a beautiful print up to 11x14 in size (on Epson watercolor paper-a truly beautiful paper). (I have little experience with slide film as I have never liked their inherently contrasty tonalities.) My own initial results show that digital works well in the print (using the criteria above) at 8x6 (printed on Epson watercolor paper on the 2200). I love the digital workflow over scannning any day, but one is quite dependent on the quality of the RAW conversion software. To arrive at the kind of quality one would get with medium or large format, I'm now experimenting with stitching several digital 'negs' together to arrive at a large final print that suits my quality criteria. I would welcome thoughts on this as I'm just starting out in digital (with a D100 for the moment).
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Dan Sroka

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Scanned 35mm vs. Digital
« Reply #6 on: March 26, 2003, 03:54:03 pm »

I have worked a lot with both scanning and digital (Nikon D100), and I agree with Erik's statement: it depends. To my eyes, the two formats are now very comparable to each other in quality. They yield very similar results, but both have a slightly different aethetic flavor (much like different types of film). Some people prefer the look of one over the other, whereas some projects benefit from the use of one over the other.

For my work, I found that it was taking me 30-45 minutes per scan simply to capture the range of color and detail I wanted from transparency scans. This involved a lot of working the software, tweeking its variables, scanning, and rescanning -- all trying to get an image the "felt" similar to what I saw on the light table. When I first started work with the D100 -- pow! I was amazed at how the images right off the card were already what I was shooting for. Plus, by shooting in raw, I can use Nikon Capture to massage the images even further.

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I love the digital workflow over scannning any day, but one is quite dependent on the quality of the RAW conversion software.

But this is much like you are quite dependant on the quality of your software when you scan. Personally, I have no issues with quality of conversion software -- I find that Capture does amazingly well for me.
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