What is the best scanner for 35mm black and white negatives to print high quality fine art digital prints?
September 27th, 2008
Linda B asked:
I’m not interested in the cheapest, but the best - high quality to produce fine art photographs on a digital printer and relatively easy to use.
I’m not interested in the cheapest, but the best - high quality to produce fine art photographs on a digital printer and relatively easy to use.
I have an HP ScanJet 5370C with a 6 x 6″ neg scanner.
Very easy to use, scans to 1200 dpi, B/W, color, vector, raster, OCR. I’ve had it for 4 years, scanned thousands of negs and transp., and it’s still going strong.
The only disappointment I had — and it wasn’t the scanner’s fault: I scanned negatives from an old pocket camera. The film was typically grainy and in that extremely small format. Yuck!
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It may not be so much the scanner you choose, as the printer. Cheaper printers can give a slight cast to b&w prints. You need to go for one - like the more expensive Epsons - which had a dedicated photographic b&w printing cycle, or replace all the inks with photographic b&w inks, keeping a printer dedicated to that work.
The best scan method possible is a high resolution drum scan. Have the lab scan the image at the highest resoluton the scanner can give - this could be like 5K dpi. They’ll say 300 is enough, but doing a master scan and then sizing down always yeilds a better product. Also scan in 16 bits. These cost at least $40/scan. A&I in Los Angeles, The New Lab in San Francisco and West Coast Imaging all will understand your request.
Can’t afford that”? (Who can?)=A Nikon 4000 tabletop film scanner is the best way to go. Flatbed scanners with transparency adapters are not actually designed to scan film. Scan at the highest dpi = 4000 and in 16 bits. Save as Tiff file. copy file and work on copy. When you are finished save this as the master file for this image.
When you are ready to print duplicate the image and resize to 300 or 350 dpi. (You ever make gravy? You get better flavor from using consume or stock than water. This is the logic behind the massive resolution of the scan.) Because you have a master file in 4000 dpi, you can size the image any way you want, whenever and print it at 300/350 (or whatever as the technology changes.) You never have to retouch the image again. Saves a ton of work over time.
Print on an epson r2400-developed and optimized for fine b/w
printing.
Have fun.