{"id":770,"date":"2014-02-21T06:19:58","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T06:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crunchyspaces.com\/content\/?p=770"},"modified":"2021-04-18T01:08:59","modified_gmt":"2021-04-18T01:08:59","slug":"film-photography-scanning-and-quality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crunchyspaces.com\/content\/film-photography-scanning-and-quality\/","title":{"rendered":"Film photography, scanning and quality\u2026 for urban photography?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, obviously a film versus digital photography argument is nonsense.<\/p>\n

The creative\/designer\/artist in me really doesn’t give a hoot<\/a>. But the geek in me does find this kind of thing interesting and it is something that I tap into occasionally.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons why it is so easy to get a higher quality with digital cameras, is because there are less processes involved in digitising the image. Quite simply, you click the shutter and the image is captured. Transferring that image to a computer has no effect and even careful post-processing shouldn’t make that much of an impact.<\/p>\n

Film, on the other hand, for those of us who like to dabble in it<\/a>, can be more problematic. First of all, most film wasn’t developed for digitising \u2013 it was developed for darkroom wet printing. Or perhaps pre-desktop publishing printing. More recently, some films have apparently been developed for better quality scanning. But we’re still talking about holding a piece of film flat (good luck with that) on a scanner and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n

No comparison<\/h4>\n

So, I thought I might have a little look at the difference in quality from two different scanners. I don’t have access to drum scanners anymore \u2013 fifteen years ago, as a designer, I would be sending transparencies out for drum scanning on daily basis \u2013 but I did recently have one of my images scanned for an exhibition. It was scanned on a Flextight 949 scanner. I decide to see how much of a difference there would be compared to my lowly, but perfectly serviceable, Plustek 8100.<\/p>\n

I should say, that this is not a scientific experiment. Nor is it a Plustek versus Flextight scanner comparison. For example,  the first thing that I did was to resize the Flextight scan to the same resolution<\/a> as the Plustek scan, for easy comparison. Obviously, this is essentially a ‘post-processing’ effect.<\/p>\n

Filters off<\/h3>\n

That aside, both scans were made ‘flat’, with all filters and processing options switched off (at least, as far as I know \u2013 the Flextight scan was done by a bureau, so I am relying on their word for this). I then resized them to fit my blog column width, of 500 pixels.<\/p>\n

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