Digital BW, The Print

> What's the current vibe on the Nikon vs. the Polaroid for scanning 6x7 BW
> negs?  I remember seeing film holder issues discussed.  Who wins?  What's
> the best software for these...Vue Scan?

I had a look at both and chose the Nikon. It has the edge in sharpness, and
the ICE features are incredibly useful if you scan colour negs or slides.
The grain reduction feature can also be useful at times.

A lot of people are using the Polaroid and are quite happy with it. What
killed it for me was that the 120 filmholder cropped the edges, and there
was also some ghosting from the edge of the filmholder. I understand that
Polaroid has recently released a glass filmholder that will allow full frame
scans, and also is wide enough to accomodate 70mm film. With the Nikon I
need to trim 70mm film down to 120 width.

Vuescan works with the 8000, but for B&W I tend to prefer the look of
Nikon's software. Nikonscan has a tendency to clip the highlights at the
default settings. To get around this I simply set the gain to a value of
around -.3

I think you can get good results from either scanner. Personally, after
having used ICE, I would never buy a scanner that didn't have it. Whichever
scanner you choose, you'll also want to get a glass carrier.