Peter Figen Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Tim - Yes, I completely understand how film has lost favor particularly in commercial work, but there are certain types of images where it's still just subjectively better. I still have all my RZ stuff and the Mamiya 7 with four lenses, but I also have a brand new 5DS R as well, and that's where I go to first. I still shoot film for personal projects but very very seldom for any commercial work. No one wants to pay for film and processing or scanning anymore and they certainly don't want to wait a few days to see their images. That's the world we're living in. My next film experiment is going to be buying a few 120 rolls of Adox CMS II, which is, from what I hear, similar to the long discontinued Technical Pan from Kodak - in terms of grain, sharpness, acutance and overall image quality. That should push the limits of those M7 lenses, but I'm going to have to dig out my developing tanks and soup it myself as my preferred black and white lab here in L.A. won't use special developers any longer.
Dustin - West Coast Imaging uses a Heidleberg Tango drum scanner - a very good scanner, but also one that is hamstrung by a 10 micron minimum aperture, which means that in one direction you get an effective 2540 ppi resolution and only by using smaller steps in the stepper motor does it make finer increments for higher resolution. So you get this higher res in one direction only. You can see the affect by visiting Mountain Light Gallery in Bishop. West Coast did the scans for Galen Rowell's prints, and you can clearly see stair stepping on the 32x48 inch Lightjets displayed there.
So while they are absolutely correct in their statement that it takes an artist to make great scans, and they do make great scans, they're also overstating the actual resolved resolution by using the manufacturer's advertising claim and selling that as reality. This is important to know if you're shooting T-Max100 or Adox CMS with very sharp lenses and are expecting to get the most out of your scan. The only two scanners I know that actually resolve closer to their claimed resolution are the ICG and the Howtek/Aztek both of which use 3 micron apertures for 8000 ppi and a real rez of around 7000+. Having had scans done on Heidleberg, Crossfields, ICG's and done thousands of my own on Howteks, I can tell you from personal experience that you can actually see the difference in scans of film that actually have information beyond the real resolution limits of that scanner. This is all stuff that I had no inkling about when I bought my first drum scanner seventeen years ago and my second one fourteen years ago. I only learned later on and was certainly happy that I had stumbled onto a great product without knowing what made it great at the time. Sometimes you get lucky.
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