Obviously market forces led to the demise of K25 ... or at least that is
likely what Eastman would have us believe, along with the performance of
K64, which, IIRC, they touted as so imporved that it was a worthy
successor to K25. I never bought any of those arguments.
In all the discussions of film scanners, it appears to me that
reasonably priced scanners (i.e., non-drum) are not designed well enough
to deal with dynamic range. Am I interpreting correctly? If so, then
why not? If the DSLR sensors exhibit better dynamic range, it would
seem to me that a kick-arse film scanner could be designed to pull more
out of film in one pass than we are currently getting.I'm no optical
engineer, but I'm having dinner with one tonight, so I'll ask. My guess
is that it's largely about the market and economics. Or have we simply
not seen film designed with scanning in mind. If that's the case, then
at this stage we probably won't see such a film.
Earl
AG Schnozz wrote:
>I just scanned a K25 slide that I took several years ago in the
>Bob Marshall Wilderness of Sunburst Lake. This was done on an
>ancient Nikon Coolscan II and took a total of four passes to get
>done. (the slide was too contrasty for one pass).
>
>I worked and worked it in PWP and got, perhaps, the best scan
>I've ever had--sharpness wise. Now, this is a 2700 dpi
>scanner--not exactly earth-shaking in the resolution
>department--and I've fought the sharpness from it from day one.
>It never came close to capturing half the detail from the slide.
> I'll have to check, but I think Sir Hamrick must have improved
>something in the latest version of Vuescan.
>
>Well, the photo was taken with the 35/shift lens and all of the
>best-practices utilized for maximum sharpness. With a touch of
>border cropping in there, the image is 3565x2377 pixels.
>
>LOOK MA! NO ANTI-ALIASING FILTER!!!!!
>
>You can make out the tiniest details. Rocks, tree branches,
>wavelets, etc. I can only imagine what a 5400 dpi or drum
>scanner could do with this image. But in reality, with the 4x
>overscan I probably did pretty well.
>
>No, grain isn't an issue. The only noise visible in the print
>is caused by the scanner itself.
>
>Velvia is good, but not THIS good. The E-1 is good, but
>definitely not this good. Remind me again why K25 was
>discontinued? Oh, and remind me again why I traded off my
>35/shift lens?
>
>A scaled down version of this image will appear on my homepage
>sometime tonight when I update the website.
>
>AG
>
>
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