What resolution would a high street lab scan?

My wife took a 35 mm colour print film into a high street lab and asked
for it to be developed, 3 sets of prints and scanned to CD. I did not
tell her what resolution I wanted them scanned at, but assumed they
would use something half reasonable.
The images have come back scanned at two resolutions - the highest of
which is 1500 x 1000 pixels. I'm sure most people would agree a 1.5
Mpixel camera would be poor, and even mobile phones are available with
more than 1.5 Mpixel.
Do you think this is acceptable? I am tempted to go back and ask them to
scan them properly at a usable resolution or refund the money, as I feel
its a bit of a mickey take to scan at only 1.5 million pixels.
I'm interest in how common this practice is.
--
Dave K MCSE.
MCSE = Minefield Consultant and Solitaire Expert.
Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@domain. Hitting reply will work
for a couple of months only. Later set it manually.
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Dave (from the UK)

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

Correction:
The IV-ED does 2900 ppi, the Coolscan 4000 does 4000 ppi.
For some reason the IV-ED will let you enter 4000 ppi in the the menu,
but it only scans up to 2900.

No_name

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

Nikon Coolscan IV ED does 4000 ppi & it only cost about $600 when I
bought it new. They really should be able to get better than 1200 x 1800
from 35mm negative.

No_name

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

I was referring to having Kodak digitize them, at $2.00 per image.
Much of my type of work can be done with a simple point & shoot digital
anyway. And I always have all my film stuff for more demanding situations.
I don't think I'll ever get a DSLR. I realize now that I am a minimalist at
heart, and that I usually don't want to carry 25 pounds of gear around.
I've been looking at the Casio Exislim, in fact. Rockwell gave it a good
review in comparison to his Nikon DSLR--and the Casio fits into a shirt
pocket!
http://www.kenrockwell.com/casio/exz750p4lens.htm#perf
To me, small digital cameras are analogous to when photographers put down
their speed graphics for the Nikon-F.

Jeremy

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

Somehow the thought of shooting on film, then having it digitized onto Photo
This is true if you are starting from scratch. But if you are 70 years old,
and have boxes and boxes (several thousand) slides, already taken and
processed, and you want to scan them into your computer so you can clean
them up, crop out significant images, send them to your children and
grandchildren, and archive them, then you would be well advised to buy a
good film scanner. And, having done that, you might as well continue to take
slides and digitize them with your scanner, rather than purchase another
camera. Or, at least, put off purchasing a digital camera until it is
terribly evident that they can produce much finer images at a much lower
price, and your film camera is completely obsolete.

William Graham

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

When Kodak offered the Photo CD their labs used a separate workstation for
scanning the films and burning CDs. I recall that some photofinishers were
charging $2.00 per frame, plus the customer had to purchase what was
purported to be a special CD blank, at a cost of $10, to which additional
frames could be added. The lab was not permitted to burn the files to just
any CD blank--not even a Kodak-labeled one.
So, using your example, it would have taken 2 CDs for 6 24-exposure rolls
($20.00 for the CDs), plus 24 exposures x 6 rolls = 144 prints ($288 for the
prints) or a total of $308 plus tax, assuming that the photographer wanted
all frames scanned--and that is before the cost of processing the film or of
making even a single print!
Unless one did only one or perhaps 2 rolls of film per year, the cost was
prohibitive. Perhaps 10 years ago, when film scanners were expensive, it
might have made sense, but it is easy to see why Kodak discontinued the
Photo CD.
Frankly, with the relatively high per-shot cost of film, it is easy to see
why so many photographers have shifted to digital. 30 years ago, we tried
to economize by shooting slides rather than pay for prints of entire
rolls--when we knew that the majority of the images were not going to be
keepers. Some of us experimented with inexpensive Eastmancolor movie stock
that was respooled into 35mm cartridges. The film cost $1.00 per roll,
versus Kodacolor II that was sold for $3.50 per roll. I was disappointed to
see my images fade into virtually nothing as the years went by. That was
certainly no bargain.
Some guys did their own darkroom work, but the cost of chemicals and paper
often was more expensive than letting one of the major photofinishers do the
job. Some of us used discount mail order finishers, like Clark Photo, whose
bright yellow mailers were stuffed into our Sunday papers just about every
week. But their results were often washed-out, or had a gray cast. I read
that they routinely used the chemicals beyond the recommended exhaustion
time, as a means of saving money. So one gambled whenever he sent his film
to places like that. Sometimes they were all right, other times they were
awful.
We also had those little drive-in booths in strip malls, "Fotomat." They
were on a par with drug store processing. And the cost of paying the girl
to sit there all day long probably ate into the revenues--how many rolls of
film had to be processed just to pay the overhead on each of those thousands
of little booths? They used to be located everywhere. Then one day they
just seemed to disappear.
If I were a high-volume shooter I'd have to abandon film. Judging from the
way that prices have tumbled on decent digital cameras it appears that PRICE
will be the factor that drives the nails into film's coffin. The amateur
photographer today probably already owns a computer and has an Internet
connection. All he needs is inexpensive editing software like Elements or
Paint Shop Pro and a digital camera and he's in business. I still do not
own an inkjet printer--I get better results by using online printers that
print on silver halide paper.
Somehow the thought of shooting on film, then having it digitized onto Photo
CD, seems way out of date.

Jeremy

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

I've mainly used the Frontier 340. The standard setting on these when
doing customer prints and CD's is to do a simultaneous print & scan. In
this mode, it will scan at 300dpi for prints 5x7 and smaller, or 280 dpi
for larger prints. Basically, what it is doing, is burning to CD the
information that it scanned in order to do the print. So if the lab
prints 6x4's as their standard print size, 1800x1200 scans is what it
will do. If 5x3.5 is their standard print size, then you will get
1500x1050 scans. 8x12's come out as 2240x3360, which is the highest res
the 340 will do from 35mm. This is what happens if you do _simultaneous_
print and scan, which is what most labs will do to save time. You can
however do a print at one print size, and a scan at another, but you
have to feed the film twice. To simultaneously print 6x4's and scan at
1800x1200 res takes about 2 minutes for a 24 exposure roll. To print
6x4's, then re-feed the film to do a scan at 3360x2240 res takes about
30 minutes for a 24 exposure roll. While the machine is scanning
something it can't do anything else, so this is the reason why you are
unlikely to get anything better than 1800x1200 from one of these
machines. Some photofinishers will offer the high-res scan, but charge
accordingly. As you can imagine, getting a dozen rolls of film to scan
at high res (6 hours) would really mess up the throughput for the day.
Some other minilab machines may operate differently, and so have
different effects on througput but my experience is with the Frontier
340. I believe the frontier 570 is capable of simultaneous digital
prints and film scanning, so a photofinisher with a 570 would probably
be a bit friendlier to the concept of high res scanning.
Interestingly, the scan resolution of the Frontier 340 doesn't seem to
be DPI based, but rather based on the output size. The machine allows
you to zoom/crop prior to printing, so if you select 8x12 as the print
size, crop in on about half the neg and print it, you will still get a
3360x2240 scan of that smaller area - which of course corresponds to
scanning at a higher DPI compared to scanning the whole neg.

Graham Fountain

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

Agreed.
With the exception of a small percentage of labs that offer specialty
services, one should expect no more than a consumer-oriented scanning
service.
And for good reason--most consumer labs have little call for anything other
than the equivalent of Picture CD, because most consumers that want digital
images probably already have digital cameras. Photographers that want more
resolution from digitized film are probably already doing it themselves,
rather than paying for film, processing and scanning per frame (plus the
transportation costs of dropping off and picking up the film), just so a
film processor can do it.

Jeremy

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

In article <%QWpg.104$0G2.47@trnddc07>, jeremy@nospam.com says...
Probably true just as you wrote it. But the point remains, if you take in a
roll of film today and simply say "also put it on CD", then there is a really
good chance that 1536x1024 pixel Kodak Picture CD is what you will get. This
is the equipment that they likely have.
If you have higher expectations, then you should get it settled before, not
after. And if they can do it, you should expect to pay more too.
--
Wayne
http://www.scantips.com "A few scanning tips"

Wayne

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

When Picture CD was first introduced Kodak was still promoting its
professional "Photo CD" product, which offered much higher resolution albeit
at a higher price.
Kodak positioned their "Picture CD" more toward the casual film photographer
that wanted to be able to get digitized photos for sharing over the
Internet--and the Picture CD resolution is quite adequate for that purpose.
There was even enough resolution to make an acceptable 4x6 print.
But I do not believe that Kodak ever intended Picture CDs to be used for
digital archival purposes, or to be the source for higher-quality (i.e.,
larger-sized) prints. Kodak always, as far as I know, marketed the product
for amateur purposes.
Once higher-resolution film scanners became available, the Photo CD product
really became a bit dated. Who was going to spend a dollar or two PER
FRAME, and travel to and from the processor (or pay postage), when they
could scan in-house?
So now we are left only with Picture CD, and who knows how long even that
will last? It may serve as a poor man's "Photo CD," but its limitations are
obvious.

Re: What resolution would a high street lab scan?

I'll put it down to experience then and will ask another time if I want
decent resolution. At least I still have the negatives.
I forget what film this was, but it is not a professional one. But the
images are clearly limited in quality by the pixel size, and not any
other artificts or gain size.
--
Dave K MCSE.
MCSE = Minefield Consultant and Solitaire Expert.
Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@domain. Hitting reply will work
for a couple of months only. Later set it manually.
http://witm.sourceforge.net/ (Web based Mathematica front end)