>
> Thanks. But I'm now trying to scan the film myself and am even more
> dissatisfied. I've yet to produce anything as good as the Wal-mart scan.
>
I'm getting really nice scans of ALL of the Portra films now. Since they
reformulated, scanning is almost a dream. The grain of the 400NC is as close
to nonexistent as I've seen in any print film and in all honesty, could be
used exclusively for all but the most critical (and landscape) purposes.
I'm not totally satisfied with the colors, though, and even though they are
good, I have to crank in a lot of contrast and saturation to get the look
we're used to. Fuji 160S is, from a color and contrast perspective, as
close to a dead-ringer for the E-1's digital images as I've ever seen.
Completely interchangeable, as far as I can tell.
Portra NC films have one really critical advantage over all other films,
though. No film comes close to the perfect skintones that the Portra films
have--except maybe for the long-since gone Vericolor II.
The new formulation of Portra 400NC has the grain of the old Portra 160NC.
The new Portra 160NC is also much better, but lacks the edgy bite that Fuji
160S has in the details.
BTW, one side not on 35mm scans. When downsized to about 3000 pixels on the
long edge, the images are extremely sharp, grain is minimized and you don't
get sharpening halos. Combined with a bit of noise-reduction, these images
print up as nice, or nicer than most anything coming from digital as there
is a sublety in the color tones which digital misses. Best of all, when you
have contrasting colors (green/purple) you don't get wierd color transitions
where they meet.
It's just a shame about that workflow thingy...
AG-Schnozz
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