B/W scanning

Today I turned the scanner on and created a new preview, behold! I am now only seeing 16 of the 30 previews. Now this is where all the problems have occurred, when changing from one film type to another you must recalibrate the scanner again, use the Calibrate Execute button on the bottom of the ScanGear panel. Pressing this also brought back the missing frames. I am going to scan an image at 4800 dpi and see what this scanner is going to present me with.

You can select Calibration for every scan, but this will add extra time to your scanning
Before calibration	after calibration

The full frame 35mm negative took 2 min 52 seconds to scan at 4800 dpi and produced a file size of 29.1 mb (Greyscale). Without any USM the image looks very soft. There is little if any sharp detail in the picture.

Whole 35mm frame scanned in at 4800 dpi (31.5 mb in Greyscale)
Straight scan	Scan with USM in ScanGear
Straight scan with USM applied in Photoshop	USM in ScanGear and Photoshop

As you can see from the above examples you have to work at getting a good quality b/w scan from 35mm. I will try scanning some medium format negatives later on, let's hope they produce a better result.

Having resolved the two missing frames issue the other problem of returning to the ScanGear interface and seeing the b/w negatives in Colour is still unresolved. Another problem which seems to have come to light is the Auto Tone. Although this is set to OFF when an image is cropped the tonal values also change. At the bottom is a Exposure Tone setting, this allows you to set your exposure value, but cropping in on the picture produces the same effect, i.e. the exposure changes. This can be tiresome especially if you have been making some manual corrections, it seems like ScanGear has a life of its own.

Previews are back in Color (Colour in the UK)	Turning off the Auto Tone is good mouse practice
Tones are set, a tight crop on the window and tones go tight out of the window

Colour negatives

For this part of the test I am keen to see how the 9950F handles a colour negative. I have placed a single strip of 35mm Kodak Gold (hands up those who remember Kodak). The preview image is superb, the negative has jumped to life. I have opted for a full frame scan at 4800 dpi, this produces a 87mb file or if you like, a 28 x 19 inch print at 240 dpi. The colour of the scanned image is excellent, I cannot fault this in any way. Even the image sharpness seems to be a lot better, this scanner prefers colour film.

Details from the full 4800 dpi scan

I will take a look at medium and large format film scanning next.