Butch Black wrote on 02.03.05 4:41: > FWIW I seem to remember reading somewhere that the LED illumination used by > the Coolscans doesn't always work well with Kodachrome and B&W and that a > fluorescent light source works better in those cases. The down side is that > on film you can use digital ICE on the LED's work better. Yes, that's true. Nikon has improved this in newer models by using diffusor, but older models had very poor quality of scanning B&W materials. The problem was that LEDs emit directional light, which had problems passing through particles of silver halides. That was never a problem for scanners with diffused fluorescent light, like Minoltas. I remember test of optical density of film scanners. And while Nikons performed great (Dmax around 3.6) when scanning slide and negative film, Dmax dropped drastically to somewhere around 2 in case of classic B&W films. And that's exactly my experience when I used Coolscan III. AFAIK only medium format Nikon's scanners (8000 and 9000) use rod dispersion LED technology, that creates more diffused light to achieve good results when scanning B&W films.
-- Balance is the ultimate good... Best Regards Sylwek
