Hi, Don,
Your points are well-taken, but I have been using north daylight (that
illuminates the basement windows near the scanner) as well as 5K
fluorescent (Chroma 50 in a light table), and fluorescent monitor
backlighting (as a quick check at night) and find no significant issues
with any film not being reasonably captured by either the Epson V700 or
the Nikon LS5000ES. These are both high end (short of drum or the
Hasselblad system). In the limited testing I did with the Nikon D200 and
the Nikon 60 mm f/2.8 AF micro-Nikkor, I used a Omega "Chromega" 2-1/4 x
2-1/4 enlarger lamp head (with no colour correction dialed in) as the
light source (which is a halogen MR-16 style lamp). While the results
were good, the feed issues, the lack of Digital Ice, and the lack of an
auto feeder did not favour this approach. I also recall an issue with
cropping and centring/straightening the slide.
A good portion of the throughput on the Nikon occurred when I filled it
up with 60+ slides just before bed and if I got up in the middle of the
night re-filled it with another 60+ slides. So that's 800 "free"
additional scans a week.
For all that has been said about this, I offer
http://www.pbase.com/rlhess/demos I've added item 6 this morning.
What is there is:
(1) A preliminary reconstruction of a self-portrait from the late 1930s
or early 1940s of my mentor, Milton F Gentsch, from the contact prints
he made at the time of the three-glass-negative 8x10 set that were
separated in the tricolor camera at the moment of exposure. I have the
glass negative sets for perhaps fifteen or so of his carbro prints.
Sadly, the prints are nowhere to be found--I do not know what happened
to his sister's estate when she died and even my 35 mm Kodachromes of
the carbro prints have not turned up during the scanning. I don't know
where they are hiding. I only have my memory of the carbros to adjust
colour to. This sample is not true to the carbro (tri-color carbon)
print and I have not had time to work on it. The three prints were
scanned on an Epson 1660 flatbed (now gone). These 8x10 negatives were
one of the reasons I bought the V700 as it can handle 8x10 transparencies.
(2) A V700 scan (on the glass) of a 127 Brownie negative. Made with
either a Brownie Bullet or Brownie Holiday Flash camera on Kodacolor
film in 1961. Scanned from the negative using the native Epson scanning
software. I still have the quality Abercrombie and Fitch nylon flag and
all the colours are true to recollection with the exception that the
scanning software might have opted for today's taste (helped along by
Fuji Velvia) for slightly more saturated than real life colours. Since
it was a negative, there was no real way of judging or calibrating the
image, although there was an effort with IT8 charts and a "spider" to
calibrate my full setup half way through the project and things were
close as we did not do colour adjustment manually at any point prior to
saving the "raw" scan files outside of the Digital DEE (@8) on the Nikon.
(3 & 4) Two Nikon LS5000ES scans from Fuji Velvia. Notre Dame Cathedral
in Paris and the Roman Aqueduct at Caesaria in Israel at sunset using
our standard settings for Velvia. By the way, Velvia was the only film
that gave the autofocus on the Coolscan a headache. It found focus
reliably on all other films, but missed a couple percent of Velvia
images. There was a significant amount of Kodachrome 25 in the overall
scanning project and there were no significant focus misses that I
caught and yes the slides are being retained.
(5) Is a series of V700 scans on the glass of a 5x7 original
transparency shot in a Linhof technical camera I inherited from Milton
and have subsequently sold when it was clear that I would not use it. I
bought the Schneider Super Angulon 90 mm lens for this project (I needed
the excuse--also sold years ago). The original TIFs are only 130 MB (43
MP) each because I knew we actually had issues with film flatness in the
Linhof--a problem I never really solved and perhaps one of the reasons
why 4x5 seemed so much more prevalent than 5x7 in the overall
photography world. A friend either just sold or is about to sell his 6x9
cm Arca rail camera system. The colours are pretty true to the original
Ektachrome transparencies--which I was never that thrilled with.
Lighting was tungsten.
(6) Is another sub-folder that contains a V700 scan originally made at
175 MP 16 bit of a Linhof original made with the Zeiss Double Protar (or
was it the Schneider Super Angulon--I seem to remember the Protar) that
I inherited with the camera. There is a small detail as a 16-bit TIF
from slightly to the right of centre above the lower barn roof. There is
also a Kodachrome 25 scan of the same basic scene after the cows went
in. That is a JPG of the raw 12 MP standard scan--the mount was included
to make certain we did not cut off any images as there is some tolerance
in slide positioning even in the Nikon and also slightly varying sizes
of mounts (not counting "super slides" which do not scan in the Nikon).
This was made on the 1981-01 trip to Toronto from NYC after I had
accepted the job at McCurdy Radio to go find a house. The lady who owned
the farm was friends of the family and I had not stopped in to see her
for years. I took the Linhof out in Glendale once more and realized that
it was not for me standing under the black cloth fighting with focus
while my wife stood by and that 35 mm fit more with my style of shooting
(VR and great quality at higher ISOs has almost completely gotten me
away from using a tripod--heck, the normal ISO for the digicam is 200
while my best quality images were shot at ISO 25-50 in 35 mm).
Cheers,
Richard
On 2012-09-19 7:42 AM, Don Cox wrote:
> My concern about either LED or fluorescent lighting is that the spectrum
> is peaky, not smooth, and could interact with the film dyes and the
> colour filters in the digital sensor to give unpredictable colour bias.
>
> I would prefer either daylight or tungsten halogen with a blue
> correcting filter.
--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.
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