Yes. I think it is a combination of very expired film and poor sharpening on my part. Here is a 1:1 shot using the Espio but with a different sharpening routine. I think sharpening this way looks better than using my previous method. I can see the individual bricks pretty well all things considered. I may also rescan a few of these and try everything again.
I re-scanned some negatives from last autumn today, using the Nikon Zf pixel shift mode for the first time - quite happy with the results! NLP Cinematic Flat profile is also really nice to make the most out of the dynamic range of negatives, dialing in the contrast after conversion.
First one is the lab scan (Noritsu), second one is my scan:
