Precision Camera offers an ultra-high resolution scanning service, with free C-41 developing ($8 surcharge for E6 or black-and-white) for GetDPI and RangeFinderForum members. They had a thread about it over on RFF, but none here, so I decided to give it a try and do a little writeup of the service when I got the images back. It's my first review, so let me know if I've missed anything.
EXIF data tells me that Precision Camera uses a Noritsu QSS-32 minilab. Pictures come back as JPGs, 4492x6774 and weigh in between 15 and 30 MB.
Let's take a look and see what that really means. I shot this picture with an 80mm lens onto 35mm Portra 400. I cropped some empty space off the top to bring the full frame down to 8x10, but other than that is just a straight scaling-down to web-friendly size.
Fresh from the original JPG on the CD, here's a crop at 100% from around her eye. It's nice to brag about this resolution, but the fact is that the output is a bit noisy, a little grainy. I almost expect that. At just a bit over 30MP, we're really, really pushing the limits of 35mm film, and we're going to have to scale down a bit to get something clean. Fortunately we've got plenty of extra pixels.
This next picture is what I got sizing the picture down to about 3600*5400. You can still see some grain, and little bit of noise reduction would go a long way to cleaning up, but this seems like a good intermediate step, just to show some progress.
And here's a little detail from her coat. It's not a bad capture of the texture in the fabric, and the individual stitches in her collar.
I really wonder how this compares to the negative as a physical artifact - how would this compare to a similar magnification on a real, wet-lab, grain-focused print? Maybe I'll find out and follow up.
In my (limited) experiments, the scans start looking presentable around 15-18 MP. At 2500x3750 (~9.4MP, roughly 8x10 printing size at 300dpi) they start looking really good - nice smooth tones and detail, with just a little "filminess" that I can't quite place - but by then you've lost the fine details like the coat fabric texture.
A few other observations:
1 - I'm generally very happy with the scans, though 6774x4492 is definitely... optimistic. This said, we can throw away an awful lot of pixels before we start suffering for any real purposes. If I were working on something really critical, though, I'd pull the best handful of images and spring for Imacon scans.
2 - I think the Noritsu shaves off about a millimeter off either the left and top edges of the frame. I notice on some scans that I've lost the tops of hats and hair if my composition was too tight. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is something to plan around.
3 - The first time I sent film in, one of the CDs came back defective, and I could only get the first few pictures off of it. That's OK; coasters happen. Rene at the film lab sent me a box, prepaid, to collect the film again and rescan. He tells me that when Precision moves to its new facility next month, they'll be able to store images for 30 days in case something like that happens again. Kudos for the service and for the impending upgrade.
EXIF data tells me that Precision Camera uses a Noritsu QSS-32 minilab. Pictures come back as JPGs, 4492x6774 and weigh in between 15 and 30 MB.
Let's take a look and see what that really means. I shot this picture with an 80mm lens onto 35mm Portra 400. I cropped some empty space off the top to bring the full frame down to 8x10, but other than that is just a straight scaling-down to web-friendly size.
Fresh from the original JPG on the CD, here's a crop at 100% from around her eye. It's nice to brag about this resolution, but the fact is that the output is a bit noisy, a little grainy. I almost expect that. At just a bit over 30MP, we're really, really pushing the limits of 35mm film, and we're going to have to scale down a bit to get something clean. Fortunately we've got plenty of extra pixels.
This next picture is what I got sizing the picture down to about 3600*5400. You can still see some grain, and little bit of noise reduction would go a long way to cleaning up, but this seems like a good intermediate step, just to show some progress.
And here's a little detail from her coat. It's not a bad capture of the texture in the fabric, and the individual stitches in her collar.
I really wonder how this compares to the negative as a physical artifact - how would this compare to a similar magnification on a real, wet-lab, grain-focused print? Maybe I'll find out and follow up.
In my (limited) experiments, the scans start looking presentable around 15-18 MP. At 2500x3750 (~9.4MP, roughly 8x10 printing size at 300dpi) they start looking really good - nice smooth tones and detail, with just a little "filminess" that I can't quite place - but by then you've lost the fine details like the coat fabric texture.
A few other observations:
1 - I'm generally very happy with the scans, though 6774x4492 is definitely... optimistic. This said, we can throw away an awful lot of pixels before we start suffering for any real purposes. If I were working on something really critical, though, I'd pull the best handful of images and spring for Imacon scans.
2 - I think the Noritsu shaves off about a millimeter off either the left and top edges of the frame. I notice on some scans that I've lost the tops of hats and hair if my composition was too tight. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is something to plan around.
3 - The first time I sent film in, one of the CDs came back defective, and I could only get the first few pictures off of it. That's OK; coasters happen. Rene at the film lab sent me a box, prepaid, to collect the film again and rescan. He tells me that when Precision moves to its new facility next month, they'll be able to store images for 30 days in case something like that happens again. Kudos for the service and for the impending upgrade.