Digital BW, The Print

> There are wet mount kits for all of the the recent Nikons including 
> the Coolscan V. Go to www.scanscience.com for a list of wet mount kits 
> made for various dedicated film scanners, wet mounts can be used with 
> any flatbed scanners designed to work with film.

Yes, it's easy to wet mount film on any flatbed scanner, assuming you 
can get a glass plate suspended at the ideal height to mount to.  The 
Coolscan V, though, is another matter, as the glass plate that fit's in 
the mounted slide holder (which is Scan Science's work flow) isn't much 
wider than the film itself, and wet mounting works best with some glass 
area all around the negative, as this gives the cover mylar a place to 
be adhered to the glass with the scanning fluid.  It's this adherence 
that keeps the mylar flat, which in turn keeps the  negative flat.  If 
the negatives have any curl, it will be extremely hard to keep them 
wet-mounted with that small glass area. I know, as I have the same plate 
that Scan Science uses, which can be sourced directly from Mike Sparks 
at Focal Point in Florida.  In addition, this extremely small clearance 
on the side might allow scanning fluid to drip or evaporate into the 
scanner, which wouldn't be good.  Finally, the Scan Science kit is very 
expensive, and it includes lots of unnecessary things.

So, my suggestion for anyone wanting to wet-mount on a flat bed is to 
get a piece of optical glass.  Get the supplies from Prazio, including 
their Mounting Oil (which isn't really an oil), scanner wipes, mylar, 
scanning tape and film cleaner.  Prazio is less expensive than the 
comparable Kami outfit from Aztek, and the Prazio fluid is a little more 
viscous than Kami and works better with mounting on a flatbed.  Mount 
the film to the bottom of the glass.  Use tape spacers in each corner of 
the glass to raise it above the scanning bed. Do test scans to find the 
ideal height.  And there you go.

For a dedicated film scanner, I recommend the Coolscan V with the FH-3 
carrier and mounted slide adapter for scanning strips of negatives.  For 
BW negatives, I really prefer Vuescan Pro to the Nikon Scanning 
software, but start with the Nikon software as it comes with the 
scanner.  Vuescan, for example, let's you pick which color channel to 
use to make the greyscale file from.  With my scanner, the green channel 
generally gives the best results.  This system will work great with 
fine-grained negatives.  If the user finds that the grain of grainer 
negatives is accentuated too much, then he or she could investigate wet 
mounting, or having that negative scanned on a good drum scanner or 
professional flatbed, such as the Cezanne or Kodak Eversmart Pro.  
Alternatively, one can investigate various noise reduction strategies, 
such as edge masks, Noise Ninja, Neat Image...

For color slides, I highly recommend getting color targets from Wolf 
Faust and making custom ICC profiles for each of the film types that 
you'll scan.  This is by far the best way to maximize color fidelity to 
the original slide.

As you can see, there's a lot involved in doing good scans, but once you 
get it down, it's not so bad.

Hutch Color has a great PDF on scanning in their info section.

-Peter