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Part 3- Colour negatives

I managed to make a really good print from a colour negative using darkroom technology once. In fact I made several. As anyone who has tried it will know, it's a very tricky process.

It's simplified significantly by employing digital technology, thank God, but I've still left it till last in this review because doing manual colour correction of colour negatives is not a task I particularly enjoy. Nevertheless, seeing as I've got all this equipment I should at least work out the best way of using it.

The test scans below are from a 35mm Fuji Super-G 100ASA negative (yes I know Super-G was replaced a while ago but I don't shoot much on negative film!)

Conclusions

1) Both scanners managed slightly better sharpness scanning the negative than was achieved by scanning the 5x7 print.

2) The least noise was achieved by the Epson in slide mode. This scan doesn't look any grainier than the print scan. The scan had to be inverted and manually colour-corrected in Photoshop.

3) Using the Epson in colour negative mode produces substantially more noise than using it in slide mode. This would appear to be the fault of the software, and it is something of a shame, as it's unlikely many people will bother scanning their negatives as slides and then painstakingly restoring the colour. Perhaps with more fiddling it is possible to get better results in negative mode.

4) The Acer produces the sharpest scan, but also the noisiest. Perhaps that is the film grain the Acer is picking up, but I somehow doubt it - I suspect it is some sort of aliasing.

UPDATE - for a tougher negative scanning test and some further thoughts about this scanner's negative scanning capabilites, see this article.

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