Digital BW, The Print

Ben,

While the occasional scratch appears on negs it isn't the norm. I use a 
Nikon LS-2000 which is notoriously good at showing up any and all defects 
like scratches and dust due to its type of light source. Other scanners 
are more forgiving if they use a more diffuse light source. I have no 
idea what the Canon scanner uses.

That said, I had a similar problem with XP2 film. My first two rolls came 
back from the lab with very very fine hairline scratches all over them, 
invisible to the eye when looked at casually. Only noticed when scanning. 
I took them back to the lab and when viewed obliquely with a point light 
source the film looked like someone had taken Brillo to it! The lab 
offered to scan it to a Kodak Photo CD for free and I took them up on it. 
No scratches appeared on their scan. Other films developed at the same 
pro lab showed no scratches. They told me that XP2 has a particularly 
delicate emulsion but that may have been to excuse their sloppy 
developing methods.

If you routinely get scratches I would check your cameras and developing 
procedure to make sure the problem doesn't reside there. If you get your 
films developed at a lab try changing labs. It is no way normal for *all* 
your films to be scratched.

Cheers,

Nina

>Over the past two year, I have been scanning 35mm negative film (both 
>color and B&W) using a Canon 2710 film scanner. I notice that I spend 
>a tremendous amount of time retouching film scratches on over half of 
>the images that I have scanned. These are very fine scratches on the 
>film base, that would typically not be visible in an enlargement made 
>in an enlarger, but which are very visible when scanned and enlarged 
>in Photoshop.