Digital BW, The Print

Hey, watch who you're calling an "old timer" ;-) I mostly do 4x5 now, 
but it's all TriX.  I scan it with an Epson 2450 and find that the final 
prints (1280) still maintain that TriX look we all fell in love with 
when we so young and foolish. I tried the new modern stuff - TMax and 
Delta but found something missing - I still craved for what I had seen 
in my misspent youth - something only TriX could deliver. Now I have 
that in the digital darkroom.

Truman

Mark Hahn wrote:

> for many of us "old-timers" (really, I'm not *that* old;) 35mm Tri-x
> in D-67 just gave a "special" look that we came to love... then we
> have drifted into the digital darkroom for one reason or another (for
> me it was a severe aquired sensitivity to photochemicals).  If we
> were currently using higher resolution scanners and printers there is
> no reason that we can't reproduce Tri-X images by digital means, we
> just need a high enough capture resolution to scan it off the film
> and then print resolution to get it back out.  When you use a scanner
> that has too low a resolution to actually capture the film grain you
> do not end up with a "Tri-X photograph."  Each pixel is going to be
> an average of a bunch of grain clumps and the resulting image will
> have a look of "Tri-X being scanned at XXXppi," which may be
> desirable to some people, but will not look like a traditional print
> from Tri-X.  As I've said before, it isn't an issue for large
> negatives becuase they don't have to be enlarged so much and you
> can't see the effect so clearly, but for 35mm you definitely can.
>
> Well, anyway... if I could still work in a darkroom I would be
> shooting lots of 35mm Tri-X and if I could digitally scan and print
> it to my satisfaction I would be shooting a lot of it as well...
>
> mark
>
> .