In my last post I tried to compare the quality of commercial scans of my 35mm negatives with various home brewed low cost alternative methods.
The overall conclusion I came to was that none of the alternatives I tried were really up to the job so after much research and several changes of mind I put a Plustek OpticFilm 8100 scanner onto my Christmas list and waited.
I can only assume I’ve been good this year as the scanner was among this years Christmas presents. I’ve only had a short time to play with the scanner so far but what I have done is to scan the very same negative that I used for my comparison of home scanning methods without spending a lot of time trying to enhance the image afterwards. Below is a comparison of the commercial scan with my own home scan with the Plustek OptiScan 8100 obtained by using the workflow recommended by the manufacturers and no manipulation of the image afterwards.
A side by side comparison shows similar results, a little more contrast with the commercial scan but remember I have done nothing ‘post scan’ to the image on the right. A close up comparison is shown below.
Again the home scanned image looks to have less contrast but also less ‘noise/grain’ which leads me to think that the commercially scanned image has been sharpened quite aggressively and maybe the excessive grain I was commenting on earlier was not grain at all.
Remember that this is only one single comparison.
I now have a few films to scan before I can comment further.
I BOUGHT AN OLD FILM CAMERA 