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Re: [OM] scanners for dummies

Subject: Re: [OM] scanners for dummies
From: "John A. Lind" <jlind@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 12:43:19 +0000
At 22:17 11/18/99 , Bob Sull wrote:
>Film scanners read the film and are capable of much better digital
>images because the info they get is directly from the film.  The digital
<snip>
>If you are scanning a photo on a flatbed you are at the mercy of the
>printer and sometimes the printed image is not as sharp as the image on
>the film.
<snip>
>If you are serious about digital image from film, a film scanner is the
>way to go.

This goes beyond resolution loss too . . .

Having done both, film scanning is *much* better, even if the intended end
result will be resized to relatively low resolution.  If you want to see
the difference, take a negative strip and a 5x7 print (non-digital) of the
same negative to one of the Kodak "Creation" stations which can hi-res scan
a print, negative strip or mounted slide.  Scan both, print them as a pair
of 5x7's on the same page and then look at the results.  This experiment
costs about $9 but will remove doubt as to the difference.

I found flatbed print scanning loses saturation, contrast and color depth
in addition to resolution . . . some of it may be hardware related, but
certain most of it has to do with being a second generation copy.  

For web publishing:  Start with as high a resolution uncompressed image as
possible (e.g. TIFF), do all the color balance, saturation and contrast
adjustment with it.  The *last* step is sharpening, resizing, and
compression adjustment (as a JPEG) to get a reasonable file size.

-- John

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