Several people have e-mailed me to ask about the relative performance of a scanned print versus a slide/negative scanner. I only have one archived example which was made before I sold my Photosmart. A friend of mine, Evan Sedlock, made this excellent shot on Ektachrome 100. He had a 4x6 print made which looked quite nice overall. I then scanned the print at 300 dpi using the Photosmart's print scanning capabilities. I made hi-res scans of the slide on both the Photosmart and Nikon. All images were then resized to a 500-pixel width.
Flatbed scanning will lose this contest almost every time. Flatbed scans are made from prints which have already lost a lot of dynamic range in the printing process. Any imperfections in the original negative or slide are transferred to the print, and then the printing process introduces its own imperfections. Colors get altered, and much detail is lost. In addition, the Nikon scanner collects up to 56 MB of information from an original 35mm slide. All I can realistically get from a second-generation 4x6 print at 300 dpi is (4x300x6x300x3 colors) = 6.4 MB of information. Of course, a 600+ dpi flatbed will do a better than that, but will likely run out of available information on the print long before a slide scanner runs out of information on its source slide.
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HP Photosmart Print Scan Notice the dull overall appearance and lack of crispness in the details. |
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HP Photosmart Slide Scan Much greater dynamic range and well defined details. Look at the grass blades in the close-up. |
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Nikon LS-2000 Slide
Scan Much deeper color. Subtle red and yellow colors in the foreground grass come through nicely; better overall detail than the HP. |
