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Darkroom prints also have cultural cache, and though people try to fight it, these things matter. For instance, the differences between running film in XTol vs PMK Pyro are just less apparent in a scan. In my experience these techniques are somewhat lost when scanning. With B&W film there is an entire world of film developers and processing techniques that all contribute to the art and craft of B&W image making. Though scanning film and printing using the latest techniques is quite capable, and even archival these days.darkroom printing and processing is where it's at. Scanning film gives you enormous flexibility from start to finish.įor B&W it's kind of reversed in my mind. So, though RA-4 prints are quite beautiful and fun to make, for color I have to give the edge to archival pigment. Especially with better scanners, such as Drum, Imacon, Nikon Coolscan, even Fuji Frontier at a slightly lower resolution gives fantastic scans.
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There is not much more in a 35mm negative than what you can pull out with a 5000ppi scan. I fully believe that scanners now are capable of capturing all the character and information that you might have in a piece of film. It will really come down to the quality of the scan. The detail differences are going to be slight. Depending on the image and the paper you use, you can get an image that is a bit pictorial and soft, to razor sharp. Where as archival pigment prints from Epson give you an enormous range of papers, and the current HD/HDX line up of inks are rated to 200 years for color (400 years for B&W). I think some estimates give them about 60 years when using the latest papers. RA-4 prints are a flimsy paper material, and have fairly poor archival qualities. So to me the real differences are with the materials and archival quality. However the long and short of it is you can make fantastic scans, or you can make fantastic prints. Medium format film tends to scan better, and prints just as well so the differences line up a bit there. 35mm film enlarges quite well, where as scanning this film tends to appear a bit grainier, and less detailed.
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They also tend to be a bit more forgiving to grain in the smaller formats than a digital scan. no dye transfer prints or Cibachrome, as you can't really do them anymore.easily).Ĭolor RA-4 prints are really something. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume you're also only talking about conventionally available materials (i.e. It really changes whether you're talking about color or B&W.