Digital BW, The Print

Whether noise reduction will be useful depends a lot on the size of the
problem and how you want the grain, if any, to appear in the image.  With
very grainy film, film that'd have a very visible grain pattern in an 8x10"
print from 35mm, I found that the Nikon scanner lost detail because of the
exacerbation of grain compared to  my Canon 9950F consumer flatbed.
Software noise reduction could get rid of the grain (and a bunch of detail),
but for those images grain was an important part of the final look.  Trying
to minimize grain of  Nikon scan, i.e. making it less noticeable but not
gone, led to a nasty smearing of the grain. In these cases, my Canon flatbed
gave significantly better results than that Nikon film scanner. I was going
to investigate wet-mounting and using diffusion with my Nikon, but I ended
up getting a Screen Cezanne, and so I sold my Nikon.


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