digital camera as film scanner

Seldom is there a topic which just can't be put down, even using a 12 gauge and solids with a double tap...

the "discovery" that a digital camera can be a scanner is just such a one. Over the last 20 years I've seen this topic come up and fade away on many forums over many camera generations.

Of course those with any professional experience or training would know this as "Copy Stand" work and is nothing new.

I'd say that the first time I owned a digital camera (sixteen years ago) I had a go at this myself. Nikon (who also made an excellent range of scanners) used to even sell attachments for their digital cameras to make this "easier". It sort of did ...

You know what? The results were always disappointing ... for a number of reasons. I'll only explore some of the basic ones here.

Ok, so that was then this is now ... surely the fantasmagorical ultraJizMatic modern digital cameras make the task a breeze ... right?

Well yes and no.

Executive Summary (for the TLDR set)

• using the modern D-SLR (or in this case m43) with an appropriate macro lens will allow you to get as much detail (without splitting hairs) from 35mm film as a good modern film scanner from your Color Slides (chromes) and from your black and white negatives.
• Color Negative is an entirely different story and will require a lot of work to even get close to a decent rendition of colour fidelity.
• as the format gets larger (just like a FlexTight Scanner with its zooming CCD method) your ability to compete with even a desktop flatbed will go down. I have found that even 645 is pushing shit up hill with a fork and 6x7, 6x9 or god forbid 4x5 inch or bigger sheet will be left gasping compared to a flatbed like an Epson 4870 or later.

To do this you will need :

• a good quality macro lens (to allow close focusing to fill the frame)
• a uniform light source 
• the ability to mung up some negative holders (and you thought the supplied ones with scanners were fiddly .. wait till you DIY your own)
• a careful and methodical approach
• a steep learning curve in RAW image processing

or you could save yourself the hassle and just go spend $100 on a good used Epson 4870 (I saw one on ebay in the usa for 49) or later model (such as V700 would be sweet). Spending a bit more on a Nikon film scanner would be even better. Get one of the later LS-50 series with USB 2.0

why is it so?

The problem is that color negative is not like people think it is. Broadly speaking people understand negatives are darker where light has reached and more transparent where light did not reach. This darkness is called density. There are two things about film you should know: 

1. it has a maximium possible density (like left in the sun then developed) called henceforth Dmax
2. and it has a minimum possible density (like developed without being exposed) and from now on called Dmin

Negative (if you look at one) clearly has some density even when its not exposed. In general terms this is called the base fog and you'll need to understand it to set your camera exposure to obtain the best exposure (more on that later).

The next thing about negative is that it is coloured ... unlike black and white negative it tries to record Red Green and Blue. Now people on the net bang on about the "orange mask" and try to sound important and knowledgable to newbies (I'll call them Wangers or ZOM) in an attempt to put them off. However essentially you don't need to consider the "orange mask" but you do need to consider this point carefully. I'll indent it and leave it isolated.

the change in density of colour negative is not equal in Red Green and Blue layers.

read that again just to make sure you have got it.

I recommend you take a moment to flick over this blog post of mine from 2009 (yes that's 7 years ago) and in that I show that simply by scanning, inverting and trimming up the captured channels to reflect the above facts of life that the mysterious Orange Mask is no longer apparent ... gone just like the designers intended ... so we can step around those zombies already.

So when you look at the data sheet from a Colour Negative you'll see they provide important stuff such as how each colour channel responds in density to light.

Looking at one such graph to the left you'll see that the density of Blue when its not even exposed to light is almost half way though the range of Red.

You'll see that the density of Red ranges from much more transparent to about half that of Blue or Green. 

You'll also see that Red has a much longer range of density than does Blue or Green.  So this leads to the problem for the digital camera that each of R G and B will have different Dmax and Dmin (quite unlike a scene).

Meaning that your histograms will look quite different in your digital camera. You'll need to set your exposure so that you don't clip either end and to be honest your digital camera is not set up to do this.

Yes, that's right, the makers made the camera to take photographs of the world outside, not as a scanner.

So part of your uphill battle has begun.

What we did

This all started because on a forum for m43 cameras I went out and said that I didn't think that a digital camera would do better than a dedicated film scanner. I opinioned that it may be close on 35mm but on larger formats (120 roll film and 4x5 sheet) that it wouldn't cut the mustard. One person stepped up to the plate and wanted to put his home brew rig (powered by a m43 EM-1 camera) up against my scanners in "the ring". So here we are :-)

To do this study, I scanned two negatives, one 35mm and the other 120 roll film and posted them to him so that he could have a bash on the exact negatives under consideration. He normally uses 120 in 645 format and I normally use it in 6x9 or 6x12 ... which means his 645 image will present a sharper image on the film because the entire system (645) is geared to be sharper because its going to make a smaller image (which will therefore be enlarged more for any given print size).

Looking at samples

First I thought I'd show you the success stories ... so (yes, about time I know ...) here is the best result our collaboration has yeilded, 35mm.

Firstly the overviews

Nikon LS-4000 35mm negative

and then the same negative with the EM-1

The first thing you'll notice is that there is slight colour cast differences ... why? Welcome to the world of colour negative scanning and the principle reason why the advertising crowd favoured "Chromes" or slide film ... ease of consistent colour reproduction (despite slides being inferior in other photographic ways).

That the result is this good is a major milestone to me as I have never before been able to achieve this sort of result. 

Why?
Well you can thank all the developments in RAW processing because folks this is a tough negative to capture for a camera because of the snow (which will push the Dmax up) and the shadows in under the tress in the background will pull the Dmin right down to the base fog (wedding white dresses in sunlight are equally torturous).

Luckilly my partner gave me a bracketed series of exposures, so to get this I had to pick though them all and find one without too much scrunching down of the Blue and without clipped reds. As it was I used one with clipped reds and used the amazingly good highlight recovery tools in ACR to get the snow and clouds looking as good as they were (and there is still a slight red cast if you ask me).

So lets look into some details of the captures:

• The Nikon LS-4000 scans at 4000dpi and produced an image of 5458 x 3621 from the negative
• The EM-1 has a sensor of  4608 x 3456 but for reasons I put down to cropping and alignment to get the image in we ended up with 4140 x 2773.

Lets look at detail:

The Nikon:

and the EM-1

which is immediately obviously that bit smaller due to pixels.

In terms of details I'm going to call them a tie, however I'm going to give the nod to the Nikon for better representing the shadows (which btw if you recall is the Dmin of the negative, so its actually the thinnest part and well within the cameras ability to record because of all the densities the shadows are well captured here). Some colour noise was apparent in the snow because (I assume) the highlight recovery (only involving the red channel) was not perfect.

But both are probably quite acceptable.

Where I'm going to call it an advantage to the scanner is in work involved to get this. With the scanner you insert the film and scan. You can tell the scanner its dealing with a negative so you don't do anything more than just

• load
• scan
• obtain image

This can be done in a batch mode on a flatbed so you can load and go. Or if you want to really squezed the max from your negative, and you've chosen to scan as positive and invert (as in my blog post above):

• load
• scan
• obtain image into editor
• invert and trim up colour channel levels

With the camera

• load (I'm sure more fiddly, or if you're just putting them on a light table and moving make sure your film is flat and well masked
• photograph
• transfer RAW file to your computer (assuming you know your correct ideal exposure for that negative type which you've previously meticulously recorded and tested and hope that your light source is consistent)
• open in RAW editor and play with converting to an image (done in a tool like ACR)
• make sure you move the histograms to best fit the range in
• invert and trim up the colour channels

I'm willing to bet (having done the last steps here) that the entire process with the digital camera will be much slower - even if the capture time is faster.

Oh ... dust .. we didn't mention dust ... clean up your neg reall well because the Nikon has ICE which does a fantastic job of cleaning up Negatives ... its what it was made for.

Larger formats

So now lets move onto something bigger - 120 film. Now as I mentioned I use 6x9 format and its normally taken with my Bessa camera, which is a 1950's camera. 

A 6x9 camera makes a 6cm high image (occupying the entire film width) and stretching 9cm along the film. The 645 camera is more frugal with film and still makes a 6 cm high image but is only 4.5cm in length of the negative.

The designers of 645 took advantages of improvments in lenses to make more images out of a roll of film. So his camera is going to have better lenses meaning higher res negs.

So what this means is that we need to have higher res scans the film to obtain that higher resolution image. Its an obvious logical conclusion that the digital camera will not perform as well on the larger format as those same pixels are now capturing a bigger image.

I only have the Nikon LS-4000, not the 8000 or 9000 model needed for scanning 120 film, so I'll use my Epson 4870 flatbed. Its as its not a bad scanner but not anywhere near the quality of the Nikon. It does a resonable job of producing a genuine 2400 dpi: which is quite enough for 4x5 and 120 in 6x9 or larger. To get the most out of 645 you'll want / wish for a better result than my Epson.

So will the tradeoff in lower scanner quality equal that of the reduced ability of the Camera to capture?

Lets at what we got:

Epson 4870 

Now, keeping in mind that my partner is only intending to "scan cam" for 645 he did a section of the middle of this:

EM-1

He didn't photograph the full negative from because that would handicap his system for his needs. 

Why will it handicap him? 

Because the sensor of the camera will still only capture the same amount of pixels, photographing a larger price of film spreads the sensor capture to capture the same number of pixels but of a now greater length of film. Less pixels per inch. This is unlike my scanner which will capture more pixels the more INCHES it scans because it scans at constant 2400 Dots Per Inch, if it scans more inches, it gets more Dots (or pixels).

So, looking at the images in overview we have the same shadow colour casts here ... as the 35mm  above.

Ok, lets look at the image size details next:

• The Epson produces a height (lets not worry about the width) of 5288 pixels
• the EM-1 produced 3555 pixels presumably this could be tuned up a bit more, but 645 is not the same aspect ratio as 43'rds is so he's going to have to lose somewhere.

Clearly that's more pixels, but is it more details? Lets look now at 100% side by side

Firstly you will be more aware of the colour issues when its put side by side, none the less its immediately clear that the Epson has returned more detail from this film (taken with my 1950's bessa) than has the EM-1.  If you click the image you'll see that there is way more detail on the scan than on the camera RAW. So not only are we not capturing the outright possible details of a 645 system, we're not even approaching the limits of details that my old Bessa gives by using the EM-1.

What's more you'll not only see that there is details in the top of that fresh spruce sapling, but that it shows much better colour fidelity of the young trunk.

This is where I'm going to say this is probably a Bayer array issue, as has been found by others in high detail shots with small features of colour. Tim Parkin found this issue with his post on the missing red berries back in 2010.

Because we are capturing actual RGB pixels with the scanner but a R here, a G there and a B over there for the Bayer (and then assembling a virtual pixel in the middle of that) Array it means that colour fidelity will also suffer.

Adding to this all the above issues of handling and image transfer to me this really sinks the deal: for Color Negative in larger formats a Flatbed scanner will slam dunk the Digital Camera.

sharing my work

As I put an amout of effort into processing these RAW images I thought I'd share a little of that too. I got the impression that I did a better job of converting the RAW files into images than he did. Well lets look at those steps;

Firstly the ACR process ... I picked an image which I thought would have the best data range by inspeting in ACR, I changed the tint to move the channels around a bit:

I then changed the colour space to ProPhoto, knowing that had a wider gamut

notice how the reds are not clipped anymore? Yet all other parameters like exposure were not changed.

That got me this image:

and so then I inverted and tweaked up the R G and B (as per my tutorial above)

which got me this:

and then I rotated it and changed the "gamma" of each of the channels and applied a final curve to it (because digital camera curves are meant to match life not film)

So there you have it.

conclusion

Somehow everyone thinks that they are inventing the wheel. For as long as there have been cameras there have been copy stands. In essence using a digital camera to copy a negative with the negative in a holder is really "copy stand" work. This has always been problematic and companies like Kodak have gone to great lengths to develop films specific to the task of making copies of film or copies of prints.

 Back in the 90's companies like Creo made fantastic flat bed scanners, and this revolutionised the print and press industry. Eventually Seiko (who own Epson) made copies of those scanners and made them cheaper (if a lower quality). Then Nikon came along and made their excellent range of film scanners which evolved from the LS-1000 (which I still own) right through to the LS-5000 (which I never bought, I stopped at the LS-4000) which excelled at scanning ultra high detail on tiny film like 35mm (once thought of as miniature).

There is to my mind nothing better in the market for scanning 35mm colour negative film than the ultimate in the Nikon scanner series, even Drum scanners yeild little more (my post here from 2009). As film format size goes up, the effective "scanning" size of any digital camera goes down, while a flatbed just gets more and more competitive. If I was to scan my 4x5 at 2400dpi then I'd have 11,000 x 8,800 pixels ... to do that I'd need (ignoring the lens demands) a minimum 96 megapixel camera and to deal with the loss of details in colour due to the Bayer Array of digital cameras probably much more like double the dimensions or a square of the megapixel count.

The irony of all this is that for well under the cost of a good macro lens setup (preferably one with a bellows) you can get an Epson 4870 on eBay. Then you can keep your camera as a camera and have a film scanner that does a better job for less.

So while things have really made steps in advancement in processing a colour negative with a digital camera, we're not yet at the point where its better to do that with larger than 35mm. If you wanted to muck around with all this stuff  then yes, you could probably equal a 35mm scanner with your Digital SLR ... but its going to cost you at least as much in specialised lenses to do a good job and be harder work to obtain the results that a scanner does by design.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my partner in providing his side of this work. His effort in taking those images of the 35mm and the 120 film and his attention to detail in bracketing and focus accuracy (as well as masking the image to reduce contrast loss from lens flare) has helped make this comparison possible.

Before I began this I had not undertaken this for some years. When last I did this I entirely gave up on the idea because RAW processing did not even come close to making this possible (as the clipping of channels and reduced Blue channel width made the image look horrible). His provision of high quality image captures with his macro system and time and effort has made this possible.

I don't think he's owned scanners before, as many modern film users have come to film in reverse - that is from starting with digital.

I hope that this examination has shed light on the subject for other film users, and that given this you may consider that you can get more (much more) out of your film from this study and some of my blog posts linked to within this post.

Hope you've enjoyed the ride. And remember ... don't be stingy with your bullets and remember to enjoy the little things.

a Negative printing experience

I normally don't get my negatives printed until I've scanned them. This is because quite simply the places who print your film are incompetent (I really can't think of what else to say). Today because the shop didn't listen (more evidence to support my hypothesis) I ended up getting prints with my 24 exposures.

I glanced at them quickly and thought FFS

Item of Evidence 1

Now looking at the timber of the desk it looks like I see it here ... so my scan of the negative.

The blue light on the snow is classic up here, and as the sun is going down the sky was lit with low cloud and lovely reds. That's why I took the picture.

If I was a person learning about photography and all I saw was the print I'd be so disappointed with the my camera or me or something. But the issue is firmly at the shop. For if I take my file there (in sRGB colourspace) and print it, then it will look like my scan.

Item 2

shit, the ends of my glasses have more colour than this print.

My scan:

now I want to emphasize that I did fuck all to these scans aside from my usual process:

1. scan as positive and set levels conservatively to not loose data
2. invert in photoshop
3. trim up levels
4. apply some gamma to each channel

So its no wonder that people think prints from negatives don't look as good as digital prints. The real irony here is that negative was designed with printing in mind, not scanning.

I don't mind paying 5 bucks for the negative developing but the extra for the prints of this quality is just insulting. Sometimes you just don't get what you pay for.

comparing scans (a redux of others work)

A recent discussion on a forum about scanners made me think about what I held as being correct (based on my experience). Essentially a person was asking about spending some thousands of dollars (like four thousand dollars) on a better scanner when they already had an Epson V700 scanner.

My advice was that they should save their money and put that towards getting scans done by professional services using high quality scanners (like drum scanners or top CCD scanners such as Flextight or Creo Eversmart).

My argument was that the Epsons are good for scans up to at least 1200dpi which printed using 300dpi will be a x4 enlargement and for the satisfaction of all but submission into photographic competitions printing at 200dpi will be barely discernible. A 6x9 medium format negative will be 36cm wide printed at 300dpi and 54cm wide at 200dpi.

Naturally this was howled down by at least one perfectionist who claims that even at x2 enlargement. Saying something like:

Before purchasing my Howtek 4500, I made several 16x20 inch prints ( a very modest 2X enlargement) from 8x10 B&W negatives scanned on my Epson 4990 (and before you jump to a rash conclusion, I do know "how to drive it" and have done thousands of scans on it at optimal focus height etc). Some months after owning the Howtek, I rescanned the same negatives and re-printed them - the differences are astounding.

The above emphasis is my own.

Ok, firstly a 2x enlargement is only making a 16x20 print from a 8x10 source, that's like making a 8x10 from a 4x5 negative or a postcard print from a 6x9 (which is cm not inches) negative.

Somehow the differences in results were astounding ... without any offered evidence I'll have to take his word for it.

But perhaps I can get something to work with from a reasonably well established and informative site such as
Large Format Photography . Info who happen to publish a scanner comparison where the same slide (a 4x5 inch slide) has been scanned by the owners of many various scanners. In the interests of "fairness" these scans are offered in "raw" (straight out of the scanner) and "sharpened" where someone has gone to the effort of making the image more presentable with some sharpening.

Some people regard sharpening of the images to be "cheating" and others consider it to be a normal workflow associated with scanning. I'm in the "normal workflow" camp. My experience with using my Nikon LS-4000 scanner and my Epsons (3200, 4870 and 4990) is that the Nikon does not need significant fine sharpening while the Epson usually does.

Naturally colour matching between machines is problematic.

As the owner / user of a few of the Epson scanners I can say that many scans I've seen on the net demonstrate how badly owners normally post process their images. I looked at the sample images on the site for the Tango (as scanned by Daniel Portnoy) and the V750 Pro image (not credited) and thought that I might take one of the ones with less complex colour and attempt to colour match them and then do a little post processing. My workflow was:

1. match the V750 image to the Tango image in Photoshop (using match colour)
2. apply 1.8 pixel radius sharpening to the V750 image
3. downscale both segments to 1200dpi

Here is the result.


I'm not seeing a "astounding difference" here, to me they are quite close.

Keep in mind that this is rather a small segment of the full image.



We are looking at the small part of the folded jacket there under the seat. Viewed in this way its even harder to justify the claim that one can see the difference between a $4000 drum scanner and a $700 Epson clearly at web sizes.

Again this should not be surprising as the consensus of the owners of the Epsons is that they're good for about 2000dpi scans in the real world. Thus if you're only doing smaller prints (less than x4 enlargement or just putting them onto the web) from your Medium Format or Large Format camera then there is nothing substantial to be gained by spending thousands on the scanner you have in your home. Leave the services or professional scanning labs to spend the big bucks on scanners and take your film to them.

I encourage anyone who wishes to do this to grab the images from the site and try it themselves. As I always say, science not religion for this sort of thing.

another ultra wide on 35mm compared to G1

as part of my previous 'photo shoot' to test the G1 against 35mm slide and negative I also took this image (which I just worked through how I scan and process a Neg in this page).




As mentioned in my other blog post, this was taken with a 21mm lens on 35mm film at f3.5 I also took a RAW image with my G1 using a 9-18mm zoom. With a little processing I turned that raw file into this:


Ok, sorry I can't get the colour to match perfectly, but the DoF is quite different too isn't it. Lets look at a close section


You can see two interesting things here:

1. out of focus on the 21mm full frame looks very nice and gives great separation from the background
   
2. the film image viewed at 50% looks similar to the digital viewed at 100%

Something people are easily lost on is all of the changes which happen when you change format size. To get the same Depth of Field look you need to keep the diameter of the lens "hole" to be the same. So the changes in focal length between 35mm cameras and most digital SLR cameras mean that to keep the same shallow Depth of Field you need a much bigger hole.

How big?

To equal f3.5 on the 35mm camera, a lens on a 4/3rds camera will need to be about f1.8

That's not going to be a simple, cheap or light lens anymore. So if you wanted shallow depth of field then you'll be better off with a larger format (like full frame digital or 35mm film).


Getting back to the extra detail in the film image, probably I didn't get the two cameras perfectly in the same place, and may have been closer to the flower with the film camera than the G1 ... it was quite close and so a small difference would have make a significant change.

But the negative image looks quite nice if you ask me.

You know, I've been looking at Digital VS 35mm since 2001 and way back then my view was:

I still really like 35mm though, as its a reasonable compromise between (large format) print quality and (digital camera) convenience and cost. Its not free to run like the digital, but its not expensive for most people. It has a wider range of lens options than most digital cameras have (and I already have them) and as well as using negative, I can expose positive film for making slides for projection something I do a bit of. I've had enlargements made up to 50cm wide that look good. I find that enlargemts look that bit better to me than anything less than the top shelf cameras like the Digital SLR's like the EOS D-60. A typical A4 sized enlargement is typically not expensive (about $15 where I come from in Brisbane Australia, and less here in Tokyo). I can take my negative into almost any reasonable photo processing shop, and then pick up a print in a few days with no fuss or investment in colour printers, inks, and futzing with Photoshop to get the colour balance "just right".

Back then an EOS D60 was a few thousand dollars and wasn't as good as a G1 is now.

So what would I say now?

I'd say that while I really like the look of full frame, it has a look that you just can't get on wide and normal views with any of the digital cameras (except full frame of course ;-), but scanning really does suck, it takes heaps of time and you'll need to invest in gear like scanners and invest in time learning how. You can always avoid scanning and have your negs put onto CD directly, if the company offers a system similar to the Noritsu it can give great results (see this comparison).

So I'd probably advise someone to consider it carefully, but would tend towards recommending the digital.

but I really do like the look of the full frame at 21mm ... more so than the G1

Costs: Since the 35mm options are second hand, and there are now plenty of used digital's lets compare something like a Olympus 510 with a Olympus 35mm film camera like the OM-10.

I just bought an OM-10 for $10, I bought a Olympus 21mm lens for about $200 (they're not cheap). I know you can get a E-510 body for about $200 and you'll need to pop another $400 for the 9-18mm zoom. So that's around $300 for a film setup vs $600 for a digital. So you can see why I don't think its as simple as it was 7 years ago...

Why not try something like buying the E-510 with its standard lens, put some "legacy" telephoto lenses on by adaptor and buy a OM-10 and a 21mm for less than the cost of the Olympus 9-18mm zoom?

G1 (or any smaller sensor) and wide angles

I happen to like wide angle lenses, back when I used 35mm film I usually liked 24mm or (used carefully) 21mm. The first thing I found when I picked up digital cameras in the year 2000 was that I didn't like what options existed for wide angles. To this day the options in wide angle for 4/3rds are quite restricted ... I can think of only the Panasonic 7-17mm and the Olympus 9-18mm lenses.

So in this article I'll compare the same angle of view on full frame and the 4/3rds. I say angle of view as focal length is really a meaningless measure unless you clearly understand the relationship between that and format ... not everything in the world is 35mm you know. Thus we are talking about a wide angle of view in this article.


Before I moved over to the Panasonic G1 I was a Canon EOS user for many decades (well since about 1990 actually). I have owned the EOS 10D and 20d but I have not owned a full frame digital, I of course still have 35mm bodies lying around.

One of the things which is true with smaller sensors is that to get the same angle of view you need a shorter focal length lens.

So looking at the diagram to the left to get the same 73 degrees angle of view the smaller sensor (yellow line) needs to be much closer to the lens than the larger sensor (blue line).

This means that for the smaller sensor you need a much shorter focal length to get the same angle of view.

So more or less if you use a 21mm lens on your 35mm camera you need a 10mm lens on the 4/3rds.

If all things were as simple as this then there would be no problems, but they of course are not so simple. For a start the difference between the 35mm frame and the 4/3rds frame means that to get the same angle of view you need about 1/2 the focal length (again since the aspect ratio is different its not exactly that, but lets leave this simple).

As it happens designing a zoom lens of such short focal length that will work on a digital camera is not simple and is as such more complex than a 21mm on a 35mm. This means that your lenses may be more expensive.

I used for this experiment an old Olympus 21mm f3.5 lens on the full frame and an Olympus 9-18mm Zoom for the Panasonic 4/3 camera. As I said I don't have a full frame digital camera, so the full frame images are scanned 35mm film. I used 200ISO negative. Actually this turned out to be an interesting basis for also comparing the latest digital with 10 year old film based digital photography (yes, I call scanned film digital ... no ni).

So firstly lets have a look at the overall image from the 35mm:



Next (not quite the same angle I'm sorry) the image from the G1.



Looking at the overviews I think you'll agree i got the colour quite close ... to get the same look I started with the RAW file and processed that significantly using a few steps which I've learnt. Its interesting to see how the shadow details are similar on both but the digital still managed to have trouble with the white of the birch trunk. That might look ugly in printing if your not careful.

I still find that negative film has much better recording capacity when you need to deal with strong light. I certainly found this in my previous explorations with my 10D and 20D, but its interesting to see that nothing has changed, and even careful use of RAW files does not stop this.

Secondly I am immedately struck by how much nicer the background "bokeh" looks on the 21mm lens ... to me the 10mm looks harsh and distorted. The little Olympus 21mm is a sweet lens for sure.

Now onto the detail. Below is a screen shot of the images at 50% res on the screen. I find this a useful determination of how a print will look at close inspection. Bear in mind we're essentially looking at a print which would be 34.0 x 25.5 cm ...


Its really close isn't it ...

If you think that the top of the mushroom is looking a little fuzzy, thats because the 21mm lens has a shallower depth of field at f5.6 than does the 10mm lens, and the focus was 'just slightly' ahead of the mushroom ... need to be careful in focusing manually!

But depth of field will be effected as the important criteria there is the diameter of the aperture, not the f-stop. Please take a moment to read my article here to confirm that for yourself.

So to have an 10mm lens giving the same DoF as I get with my 21mm @ f3.5 I would need around f1.8 The Olympus 9-18 zoom is simply not that bright, its f4 so to get the same DoF I would need to stop the 21mm down to f8 From this I'm sure you can see that the "look" of images between the lenses focused on something close will not be equal if we get the f-stop the same.

I thought I'd try another angle, one that requires distance this should eliminate DoF and get rid of the significance of any Bokeh.

Full Frame



G1



I think you'll agree that aside from colour matching them (close but no banana) the images look more or less the same (well and aspect ratio).

Differences in colour rendition is significant though as I think that the digital image (lower one) handles the subtle grades in the sky better than negative does ... this is something I've found before, that digital is better suited to capturing subtle shades than Negative is, and that negative works better when you have a wide dynamic to capture.

Looking at the detail there is surprisingly little in it. There is of course no difference between Depth of Field (as infinity is all thats in the focus here) but its also quite significant that the film scanned with the Nikon LS-4000 holds so well against the digital (or is it that the digital does so well against the film? you pick).




So, this cements in my mind that larger format (sensor or film) works best for wide angles. I would very much like to compare a 5D or other full frame sensor camera to the G1 as I think that it would be just fantastic. On the other hand the G1 costs so little that if you pop that onto your 300mm lens then instead of needing to buy a 600mm lens on a full frame camera you'll get better wildlife shots, this for example was a legacy FD series 300mm lens on my G1:



Bang for buck that's cheaper than buying anything for the full frame.

My summary is that

• If you want wide angle and want nice Bokeh then use a full frame camera and a 21mm lens
  
• neg has better handling of sunny contrasty conditions,
• wide angle on the G1 (small sensor) is ugly compared to full frame, but telephoto on the G1 or APS sensor is advantaged
• unexpectedly the G1 pulls very close to the 35mm in outright resolution (which means that the main advantage of digital is still workflow and materials costs)
  
• if desiring of shallow depth of field, when using lenses wide open aperture favors larger formats like full frame (but 6x7 and large format really needs movements to correct for and is harder to manage)

Noritsu vs Nikon LS-IV ED

Some time ago I photographed an event using Negative (as I prefer it over slide for prints). As my scanner was in Australia (and I was in Finland) I opted to get the images from the negatives placed on to a CD at the time.

Now what I didn't know was that the local mini lab that processed my film was using a Noritsu for the scanning or that they'd scanned it at their highest resolution. I was pretty impressed with the results, although I didn't have an objective comparison.

Last week I finally got my hands on a Nikon Coolscan LS-IV and after spending a week coming to grips with operating it (and I've already spent some several years using other scanners including older Nikons, Epson flatbeds, HP S20 scanners ...) I thought I should turn my hand to comparing it to what I got from the Noritsu.

So, here is an overview of the scene



Now a 100% pixel crop from the Noritsu




and a 100% pixel crop from the Nikon LS-IV

I don't know what you think, but I think its not bad at all.

Actually to even get them this close I had to

• scan with the Nikon set to scan a positive (so I could set the levels less agressively than it does)
• put on ICE to cover some developing / handling marks on the film
• adjust the colour and pay attention to colour profiles

So, for less than 10 bucks at the time of developing VS spending money on a scanner and time scanning (don't under estimate that part) the Noritsu service simply kicks!

What I want to know is, with such outstanding results available for next to nothing why they aren't plugging this service more!

I'll say that whatever the advantages of digital are, one of the disadvantages is that you need to be able to store your files and be able to find them again. This is the greatest weakness of the digital camera system for most "ordinary folks".

Why? well I can't count how many times I have heard friends, relatives or neighbors tell me their computer crashed and they lost all their files (often including digital camera images). With this system you get

• a CD of your images (to keep as a back-up)
• your negatives (to keep as a back up)

I just don't understand why this sort of service (which they have already developed) is being left to languish when it certainly adds value to peoples film cameras and gets their images into the digital domain as painlessly as possible.

try it!

Nikon IV ED vs Epson Flatbed

The aim of this article is to compare the LS-IV ED with an Epson flatbed scanner (in this case a 4870). Since the Nikon's are still pulling good money on Ebay the Epson's seem quite the bargain (with new V700's costing about what you'll pay for a Nikon LS-V or LS-5000). The reason for this comparison is that many people make decisions on which scanner to buy without much personal experience and by only reading web pages of tests of the devices. So, in this article I'd like to compare one to the other in a variety of ways which I hope will be more meaningful than simply individual machine test results.

Background

As a long time photographer with a quite an amount of 35mm film in my store I have long been interested in scanning my film. My first film scanner was a Nikon LS-20E scanner which scanned 35mm quite nicely at 2700dpi giving files more or less about 3700 x 2700 pixels (or 10 megapixels for those more comfortable with that).

One of the first things which becomes apparent to the newbie in film scanning is just how bloody annoying dust is on the film. Nikon (and others) eventually solved this issue with the ICE technology, while the early implementations were a bit harsh on the image quality the Nikon LS-IV ED (or LS-40) was the first model to do so well at this that I was more than stunned at the results. One thing I'll say for certain up front here is that the ICE on the Nikon scanners works very very well. So if you have anything like fingerprints, dust or even washing streaks on your negatives the Nikons ICE does such a good job that the Epson isn't even usable in comparison.

Having started on Nikons and then moving to Epsons for my 120 and 4x5 film needs I had harbored the notion that the Nikon was a much better scanner for dedicated 35mm work than the Epson. My early comparisons between my much older LS-20 E and my Epson 4870 surprised me so much that I stopped bothering with the Nikon (which is clunky to use) and used my Epson exclusively.

One day I got some time on a friends LS-IV ED and was so impressed by how much better is penetrated the shadows of a particular slide and how well the dust removal worked that I decided that I should get the latest model (the LS-V) or a used LS-4000.

Now that I own an LS-IV ED I have done some more definitive testing, and the results surprised me.

Methods and results:

I'd like to use a segment of film for this test which has been discussed on my blog before (here for instance). I took this with my EOS 630 and an EF 50mm lens when doing side by side testing with my 20D, which can be found here.

After getting used to the Nikon for a few days, I scanned this negative and was immediately surprised that it didn't look any clearer than that obtained by my Epson flatbed. I opened up that image (and also the RAW file from my 20D too) for comparison. Below is a screen grab of that.


Now, don't get stuck on the colour rendition of the Nikon as I didn't do much work on that to match the Epsons (and if you've ever used two scanners you'll know how hard it is to match one negative on two machines), but look at the details, the leaves and the brick work. Now I know that 2900 dpi is not enough to capture what's on 35mm (see my 2002 pages on that here), yet still I was amazed that the difference would be so much.

Especially given that the Nikon is often praised as being able to scan a true 2900 dpi and that the Epson is lambasted for being much less than it is specified to be.

Now, you'll note that the image from the Epson (bottom right) is much larger than the image from the Nikon, this is because it is scanned at 4800dpi while the Nikon is scanned at 2900.

Given that people will read on many photographic forums that the Epson scanners only scan more mush pixels when pressed above 2000 dpi, I think that this clearly shows that there is not borne out by my examination results.

I thought I'd try another negative, and pulled out an old favorite which is also quite a challenging negative (being shot right into the sun). I was so glad I was using Negative for this shot as I'm sure a digital would have needed HDRI to get this...




This was scanned on my Epson 4870 (at 4800dpi then scaled back to 2400dpi) and I think it did a pretty good job. I scanned it today on the Nikon and even tried fiddling with selecting focus points and adjusting manual focus. Its a nice flat negative (thanks to good storage) so I believe that it scans easily.

It is however a very challenging negative to scan as it has high-light like you wouldn't believe and needs the shadow details to make it a picture. Lets look at some details from it (please click on any of these images to load a larger copy, the ones below are 100% crops from the scans).

A corner of the roof from the Epson:



and the same corner from Nikon IV ED

I think they are pretty equal, perhaps when you look into the patterns in the ends of the tiles there is slightly more detail in the Epson scan and I could get better high-light detail in the sky from the Epson too. To do this with the Nikon I had to scan as positive (muchos fiddling with the SA-21 required to line up the thumbnails for prescan aligment) and set much less agressive clipping points.

Looking again at my scan from my Epson I was surprised, both seemed to show more or less equal detail and handled a very dense negative quite well.

Lets look at shadow details. A segment from the Epson



and segment from the Nikon


Not much to separate them, and if anything I prefer the results from the Epson.

Conclusions

So, after all this time it seems to me that I indeed have had the greener grass (the Epson) all along.

Not only are image quality results from the Epson equal or close to the Nikon, for the Nikon to better them requires significant work, rescans and examination. So operationally its simpler to load 4 strips of 6 negatives into the Epson than it is to feed strips one at a time into the SA-21 film system. Used on Automatic Exposure and thumbnail mode the Epson is a set and walk away machine for 24 images. This may in some ways make it better.

Considering that professional scanning bureaus use flatbed systems (like the Creo iQsmart scanner), not only for their scan quality, but also to simplify operatoins this puts more points to the Epson. While the Epson is not in the league scanners like the Creo in areas such as mechanical precision for 1/10^th of the price its damn attractive.

Out of the Box the Epson does not give spectacular results (maybe that's true of the Nikon too?) but with a little tweaking of what you do and how you do it you can get significant returns. So the improvements that can be had with some attention to details in scanning those "have to get the best from it" negatives or slides (some tips can be found here in understanding and addressing the limitaitons of the Epson) I think that the Epson stacks up rather well.

Without doubt the LS-IV is not the lastest and greatest Nikon, you'd need to consider the LS-V, LS-4000 or a new LS-5000 / LS 9000 to get that, but then the 4870 compared here is hardly that either.

But this comparison was not to see if the Nikon was better or worse, in my eyes it was to see if the Epson could come within close limits, and that it did!

Hmm ... perhaps the market also thinks so too, and that's why Nikon is rationalizing its scanner market (stripping out the 'consumer' end and leaving only the 5000 and 9000 scanners) and that Epson seems to be continually developing and improving their scanner "for home users".

So, if you've bought (or are considering and Epson) don't think of it as the poor cousin of the Nikon LS-IV or even the V ... recognize that you've got a very good value for money package.

NOTE: when I bought the Nikon, and did some scans I was thinking that the results were not perfect, so I dismantled it (following this fellows instructions) and found that the mirror was indeed filthy. I carefully cleaned and replaced the mirror and this indeed improved the contrast of the scans (although not the resolution). BTW ... if you do follow his instructions, I recommend turning the scanner on the side not upside down when removing that clip. The mirror can then be neatly removed at no risk of falling with a chopstick with a blob of blue-tac on it.

Lastly, I value discussion, so if you disagree with my findings and have got both units and have made comparisons between them (rather than just have opinions based on personal faith in what should be and some net reading) and would like to supply some evidence then please post a link to that, as I would love to belive that the Nikon is better than the Epson ... and pretty soon this Nikon is going up on ebay and I think I'll be looking at trying an LS-4000 (these really do draw the best from problem negatives).

but who knows, I may just stick with the 4870

:-)