Digital BW, The Print

> I don't know the code in PS, so I can't comment.  Today I ran a small
> experiment. I scanned a B&W negative on my 2450 in 16 bit mode and saved
> it in 16 bit tiff. I then read the image into Matlab and did some
> analysis on the data. A histogram on the data and found that the active
> bins ran from about 2000 through 16,000. I am going to repeat this with
> a negative with deeper shadows to see if I can light up the lower bits.
> But in any case the difference between the high and low is 14,000 which
> is quite a respectable dynamic range.

Truman,

How did you set-up the scan?  Is this strictly raw data?  Are there any
setpoints and/or curves being applied to the data by the driver?  Are there
gaps in the data?  How did you determine what was valid image data?

There is physically no way a B&W negative can give you 14k different codes,
it just doesn't exist on the film...  Something's wrong...

Austin