I enjoy B&W photography with my Leica. I have a lot of negatives(most have prints made as well). i would appreciate your opinion on the best way to scan B&W photos for high quality Web publication? scan the negative or print? Which scanner? I am in the market for the right scanner. Richard Wu

-- Richard Wu (Finance_richard@yahoo.com), November 12, 2000

Answers

I'm sure you will find as many answers as photographers, but for my money the best scanner is the Microtek ScanMaker 4. It has a resolution of 600 dpi and will handle prints up to 9x14 inches and negatives up to 8x10 inches. If you need higher-resolution negative scans, you will have to get a negative scanner (much more expensive), but the ScanMaker 4 is perfect for images that will be used on the web. I find that I get better scans from prints, but I have a lot of negatives I have never printed, so I do a lot of negative scanning too.

-- Ed Buffaloe (edbuffaloe@unblinkingeye.com), November 13, 2000.

If your only scan negs for the web make sure you only scan at 72dpi jpg format. Screen resolution is only 72dpi, jpg is themost widly use file format for web. Before your done with the image in photoshop make sure it's not more than 250k so it will load fast. You will want to scan for the best result from the negative (i.e. Dmax and Dmin). The best scanner is depending on how much money you have. Just like your leica you get what you pay for. The Imacon Flextight Percision2 is the one I use. http://www.imacon.dk/usr/imacon/wppImacon.nsf/htmlpages/Sc anners.html Hope this helped. Scanning for high quality results is a whole new can of worms. But it's fun and no inhaling of those nasty fixer fumes. Scott

-- Scott (scottevans@mediaone.net), October 30, 2001.

Richard:

If you are doing this for web presentation, a flash light and a light sensitive chip will give you all of the resolution that you need.:)

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), October 30, 2001.

I use a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000. I scan at a full 4000 dpi, take the scan into Photoshop for "printing," adjust the image size down to where I want it, and post over the web. This only changes the size of the image, in pixtels, not the detail. Anyone telling you to use a flashlight doesn't know what they're talking about. There is no substitute for dpi. You can always go down, but you cannot go up. I've also seen some very nice print scans done with an Epson 1680.

-- Leicaddict (leicaddict@hotmail.com), November 01, 2001.