Digital BW, The Print

At 10:17 AM 4/5/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> John,
>> 
>> Find someone with a flat-bed scanner and get them to scan a 
>> negative. You may be surprised that it is plenty good. A 
>> handful of drum scans cost as much as a scanner. Check out 
>> the 2450 review on my web page. The $$ trade-off makes the 
>> difference in quality seem less important. I'll wager only 
>> you and a loupe will see the difference in a print. 
>> 
>> 
>> AZ
>
>Alan,
>
>This has not been my experience.  My drum scanner pulls details out of a
>neg that NO flatbed can and the differnce is obvious in the prints.
>Using the time tested method of dragging my poor wife in the studio and
>doing the 'which print do you like better' thing (same image scanned on
>the drum and a Nikon 8000 or Sprintscan 120 then printed).  She picks
>prints from the drum 99% of time.  She can't always articulate why she
>likes them better, she just does.
>
>Lawrence

Lawrence,

It's nice that you have such a discriminating wife. Mine thinks I'm a genius
and likes all my pictures equally. I fear that were I to subscribe to the
Kravit seven step program the technical imperfections could accumulate and
leap out at me with too fine a scan.  Shouldn't there be twelve steps for
the sake of convention? We should apologize to people for all those rotten
prints we did in our past.  

I have a friend who is a very precise large format photographer and printer
who is also an audiophile who has to sit in a certain chair in his listening
room to hear his - classical only, thank you - music properly. He likes my
digital prints. We both wear cheap, ugly shoes. 

AZ
Maker of Lookaround panoramic camera.
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/8874/
         or
keyword.com lookaround