Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Since my G9 has gone in for repair I have picked up my old Canon EF and recently acquired (1 1/2 years ago) Canon F1 and started using film again. In the past the only fim I used was slides and projection was the only form of presentation, so when it comes to negative film and printing of either negs or slides in the digital age I am a complete novice.

I have a Canon 8600 scanner and it leaves alot to be desired. The most notable problem being noise. I've seen a number of posts on the tpmg forums about the v700 scanner from I get good results with 35mm negs to just desent or so so results, the scanner is really for MF and up. I guess it comes down to what you need.

So here is what I need. low noise scans with negs intentionally overexposed up to 3 stops, or underexposed intentionally 2 stops without the shadows blocking up, and in both cases the same care would have been givien to exposure as when exposing slides for the tonal range present in the scene. Enlarging up to 8 x 12, actually 5 x 7 would be the largest print in a photo book but 8 x 12 gives me cropping wiggle room.

Is the v700 good enough for what I need, can I go down to the v500 or do I have to just dream about getting my hands on a Nikon. I live in Barrie so renting the Nikon from Vistek is not convenient.

Short answer, if your negs are that far off, the scans are going to suck. End of story. You may be able to pull a printable image from a shot that's 3 stops over exposed or 2 stops underexposed but there is simply no substitute for proper exposure. There's only so much dynamic range in the image.

Negative film generally tolerates overexposure better than underexposure. But anything that's 2 stops underexposed won't have blocked up shadow detail, there simply won't be any detail in the shadows to pull out.

Overall flatbeds have 2 issues. They don't resolve as well as a dedicated scanner due to film flatness issues and a lack of optical resolution and they don't have enough dynamic range to handle high-contrast slides. If you're getting noise issues from negative scans, the problem is most likely the negs not the scanner.


That said, Downtown Camera has a Minolta Scan Dual III on sale for $200 in the used section. It's an excellent 35mm dedicated scanner. You'll need to add a copy of VueScan from hamrick.com if you're using an OS newer than XP or OS X 10.3, which will add an extra $80USD to the cost.

As I said I am a complete novice when it comes to film and creating an image for print. A lot of people overexpose there negs as a matter of course it seemed to me to be the way to go, for a first attemp, I shot a roll all overexposed by 2 stops and had the film developed and scanned by TIW and was very happy with the scans I downloaded from their FTP server. In about a week and a half I will get down to Toronto and be in the area again to pick up the film. Based on other scans I have done on the canon 8600 I fully expect to have noise issues when I scan them myself. The under exposing is something you do not as a matter of course, but a matter of necessity. ie. I find myself in a low light situation for only a part of the roll. If I set my meter for 2 stops higher than the speed of the film I still in theory have another 3 stops of EV down to go similar to slide film, thus I said setting my exposures and would have to add selecting my scenes with the same care as I would if shooting slide film. I fully expect the colours will not be accurate but that is something I will have to work out later in the editing or convert to black and white. The last thing I am going to do is follow common wisdom, but instead try to push things as far as I can and if pushing the envolope forces me to change the style of my photography so be it.
In fact the day I'm down in Toronto to pick up my overexposed roll at TIW I will shoot off a underexposed roll of the interior of the 401 building at the corner on Richmond and Spadina. Something I have wanted to do anyway, and then have the film developed and scanned at TIW.

Thanks for the info on the minolta scanner if I can get to it before anyone else. If I brouht a laptop down with me would they let me try it out in the store before buying, if not what is their satisfaction garrantee if any on used equip.

I had pretty much discounted using Vuscan with my Canon Scanner a while ago because I had just to many problems. Today when I thought about it I tryed again this time using my new netbook. The netbook runs under XP the the desktop that I first ran Vuescan with ran with Vista. Vuescan appears to work with XP with no problems except my own initially finding my way around the program. Its like I have a brand new scanner. One that does not make a whole lot of assumtions for one who likes to work outside the assumtions even if that means getting bitten in the ass every once and a while. Haven't tried it with the "overexposed" negs yet, but the "underexposed" look promising.

Dedicated film scanner is the way to go for 35mm. An older Nikon Coolscan IV or III would be ideal.

Would that still be the case if you only wanted to make 5 x 7 prints from 2400 dpi scans and if that was not possible do with 1600 dpi scans for 5 x 7 but reliquish the possibility of serious cropping. When ppl say the best way to go is a dedicated film scanner what kind of enlargement capability are they talking about? I only ask to make sure we are on the same wavelength. I see a lot of different opinions expressed but no one accompanies their statement with their actual needs to put the statement into perspective.

Dedicated film scanners provide much more dynamic range when capturing film that flatbed scanners, so it's not just a function of dpi resolution, but the depth of colours of the image and it's subtle nuances that you want to accurately capture in a scan. This is where film scanners beat flatbeds.

Have a look at my website, the entire 'Punjab' portfolio under the 'Sikhs' menu is 15 year old 35mm Fuji Reala film scanned with a Nikon Coolscan IV.

Thank you Sandeep, thats an impressive portfolio and certainly sets a standard of excellence for me to compare to.