Digital BW, The Print

Thanks Peter, that was very informative.

Any one else out there have any recommendations on the ideal dedicated film scanner for 
B&W 35mm negs... please see my original post.

Randy


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Peter De Smidt <pdesmidt@...> 
wrote:
>
> > 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
>