Digital BW, The Print

I'm giving a lot of thought to trying digital printing, most notably 
the Epson 2200.  I do mostly large format work (4X5) and some 35mm, 
generally all black and white.

I've been scanning my negs into a Microtek ScanMaker 4, using 
negative trays, and playing with them in Photoshop.  Problem is, I'm 
not sure whether the resolution of my scans are good enough for 
printing digitally.  On my monitor, 1200 dpi and below scans 
generally look soft and muddy, and usually need some amount of 
sharpening to look good on the screen.  The only printer I have right 
now is an HP 694C,which does an awful job of printing photographic 
material, so I can't take a look at the prints right now.  Before I 
jump in and invest $700 in a printer and a few hundred more for 
PiezographyBW stuff, I'd like to know if my scanner is up to snuff.  
If I need to replace that too, then I might just stay with all-silver 
for awhile yet.

The specs on the ScanMaker 4 are:

600 X 1200 dpi Optical Resolution
9600 X 9600 dpi Interpolated Resolution
3.4 DMax

At 07:14 AM 8/29/2002, you wrote:
>I'm giving a lot of thought to trying digital printing, most notably
>the Epson 2200.  I do mostly large format work (4X5) and some 35mm,
>generally all black and white.
>
>I've been scanning my negs into a Microtek ScanMaker 4, using
>negative trays, and playing with them in Photoshop.  Problem is, I'm
>not sure whether the resolution of my scans are good enough for
>printing digitally.  On my monitor, 1200 dpi and below scans
>generally look soft and muddy, and usually need some amount of
>sharpening to look good on the screen.  The only printer I have right
>now is an HP 694C,which does an awful job of printing photographic
>material, so I can't take a look at the prints right now.  Before I
>jump in and invest $700 in a printer and a few hundred more for
>PiezographyBW stuff, I'd like to know if my scanner is up to snuff.
>If I need to replace that too, then I might just stay with all-silver
>for awhile yet.
>
>The specs on the ScanMaker 4 are:
>
>600 X 1200 dpi Optical Resolution
>9600 X 9600 dpi Interpolated Resolution
>3.4 DMax

You can ignore the interpolated resolution because it's just imaginary 
pixels. You can also ignore the second part of the optical resolution, 
because that's just obtained by half-stepping the scanner. So you really 
have 600 pixels per inch. For a 4x5, that gives you 2400x3000 pixels, 
probably good enough for 8x10 prints (I generally use 300 ppi for printing, 
so 2400x3000 divided by 300 = 8x10).

You will need some sharpening to recover sharpness loss in scanning, but 
you don't want to overdo it.

You might be better off with another scanner. I use an Epson 2450 for my 
medium and large format scanning. It is rated at 2400 ppi, although many 
would say that it doesn't actually achieve that. Assuming that it does, 
however, that gives 9600x12000 pixels for a 4x5, which translates to print 
sizes up to 32x40 inch prints. Since my printers (1270 and 1280) only take 
up to 13x19 inch paper, I'lve been plenty happy with my prints from my 4x5 
scans, even if I need to crop. The 2450 is generally available for less 
than $400.

Stan

================================
Photography by Stan McQueen
http://www.smcqueen.com