I fear that my wife is keen to re-take possession of the spare room and so I am seriously looking at the possibility of sealing the tomb that is my darkroom and "going digital" with my print outputting. Now, in my traditional darkroom I would never think of printing negatives using anything other than german glass (rodagon etc) but I notice that the current best film scanner uses Nikon optics. Am I missing the point? Isn't half the point of using Leica optics their beautiful tonal rendition (which I understand is in part due to the use of German glass)? Do we through this away by using japanese optics in the film scanning procedure? Any comments would be very valuable. (on a related note do the f4 rom zooms for the R which I understand are made in Japan have the same tonal characteristics as the German stuff?) I wonder if I am the only person who values beautiful tonality above absolute sharpness...

-- Stephen Jones (stephen_jones_et_al@hotmail.com), June 21, 2001

Answers

I have been doing work in my "digital darkroom" for over 3 years now. Currently I use a Minolta scanner; not the best but for B&W seems to work well. I'm not sure if a better scanner would actually provide better negs in B&W. Input is to Photoshop and output is to an Epson 1160 using the Piezography BW system. This printing system generates wonderful non dithered prints with excellent tonality. You can check out the system and request a print sample at www.inkjetmall.com

Good luck

-- Don M (maldos@home.com), June 21, 2001.

Steve

I think that if you really want top quality black and white with all the tonality you are used to, you should stay with a darkroom. The main problem as I see it is that Photoshop can only cope with 256 levels of gray - not a patch on a real silver print. I assume the piezography system uses duotone/tritone type printing - but does it really match a silver print - I cannot see how it does really as you are always stuck with 8 bit output. My own experience is that for some kinds of subjects the digital b&w route works very well, but when you want a really smooth subtle print (say a landscape) it is a poor second compared to a good silver print. I will get a sample print from the piezo website as Don suggests to see how well they say it works, but I have experienced a crisis of confidence in digital black and white. Until Photoshop is able to operate in more than 8 bit from a grayscale source, I don't see how digital can match a true silver print, unless someone can explain it to me (?)

For color this is much less of an issue and there I do think scanning is, potentially at least, much easier than using a darkroom.

A scanner must be sharp I agree with you to match a good enlarger too. Most cannot match it so you have to resort to unsharp masking which works, but I am not so sure it is really a substitute for a first class enlarging lens. A really good drum scan will match an enlarger, but to do this for every print is expensive.

Personally, I find my Minolta Dimage (admittedly not a Coolscan), a very good way to produce better-than-most minilab output for prints from slides or color negs, but for black and white it is only really good for the occasional high contrast scene and for the web.

I urge you to approach this with caution if you are really fussy about your results.

I am by no means an expert, so all advice on this is welcome and I am happy to be proved wrong.

-- Robin Smith (smith_robin@hotmail.com), June 21, 2001.

Re Photoshop and its 8 bit grayscale. I'm no expert on digital either by a wide margin, however a trick I learned for smoother-toned digital B&W's in Photoshop is to scan in color then turn down all the saturation levels to zero before you print. Presto, 24 bit gray scale.

-- Jack Flesher (jbflesher@msn.com), June 21, 2001.

Experience in wet darkroom - 25 years. In digital darkroom - 2 years. For many things I have found the digital output (Agfa Duoscan scanner and Epson 1270) to be adequate, especially in color. But after much paper, ink and time I have come to the conclusion that though I can match most of my RC prints digitally (in B&W), they are no match for a fibre print. A well crafted fibre print seems to have a 3 dimensional feel to it that I just cannot (and believe me I know what I'm doing) match digitally.

-- Bob Todrick (bobtodrick@yahoo.com), June 21, 2001.

Once you've seen a great digital print, it's hard to think that they should be relegated to second-class status. I was in A Gallery for Fine Photography earlier this week, and the print that stood out the most in terms of pure visual quality was a digital print by John Sexton. This is in a gallery of originals from most big-name photographers. I'd highly recommend the gallery, by the way.

Also, this photographer prints digitally on watercolor paper and the results are spectacular, especially given his rather "traditional" subject matter. I've seen most of his prints as of a year ago, and can say that it would be impossible to fault them unless one happened to not like the paper he uses. But that can happen with traditional printing...

-- Jeff Spirer (jeff@spirer.com), June 21, 2001.

Jeff, I am familiar with some of John Sextons work and you must keep in mind that most of these 'digital' prints are IRIS prints (a type of print also known as Glycee. The printer is over $100,00.00 (CDN), difinitely putting it out of the home users pocketbook (mine, anyways) and here in Edmonton to have them done at the only lab that does them works out to over $150.00 (CDN) each for a 16X20" print. Definitely in the fine art quality league, but also definitely out of most peoples range monetarily.

-- Bob Todrick (bobtodrick@yahoo.com), June 22, 2001.

If you want German optics in your scanner then you might want to consider the Imacon Flextight line of scanners. They use Rodenstock lenses.

The least expensive model is the Flextight Photo at about USD $10,000. It will handle film up to 6 X 17cm at 3,200dpi. A model which handles film up to 4X5" at 5,700 dpi is $15,000.

While expensive these are arguably the finest scanners available short of a $75,000 drum scanner.

Michael

www.luminous-landscape.com

-- Michael Reichmann (mreichmann@home.com), June 22, 2001.

Yes, I have no problem with it being possible to produce fine art inkjet using a drum scanner and IRIS prints etc. etc. as stated above. The real problem is the extreme cost and you are back to the same issue of not doing at home, which is of course the whole point of having a darkroom at home. Likewise the Flextight is great I am sure. I may be missing something but I still don't see how scanning in color helps from a black and white negative since the source is in black and white and therefore there is no "extra" color information to pick up from RGB channels. Will not each channel effectively pick up the same information from the film independent of the channel, in effect the output is therefore 24 bit in name only? I agree that scanning a color original in color and then desaturating to make a black and white picture after adjusting the color levels might well be better since each channel will contain different information - but it is still, surely, effectively on 8 bit output in the end. Photoshop is the limiting factor, not the scanners anyway: even my Minolta is 36bit.

Perhaps Michael Reichmann, or anyone, can enlighten me?

-- Robin Smith (smith_robin@hotmail.com), June 22, 2001.

I switched to digital printing soon after I went to a show, stopped to look at the amazing quality of the best _print_ in the show, and then read the label that said "inkjet print". A couple of weeks ago a friend who works in a photo gallery stopped by my shop and looked at one of my prints on the wall and commented "beautiful print". Nuf said.

As for the problem of scanning glass, the scanning job is different from the photo job. In photography the glass interprets the scene and through its use and control of abberations over a 3D object gives a rendition which is not a literal translation of the scene, including the out of focus areas. The job of the glass in the scanner is to pick one tiny spot in 2D and read that spot accurately. I'd argue that for that job you'd simply want the hardest, least sympathetic glass available, and that things like bokeh aren't an issue.

-- Michael Darnton (mdarnton@hotmail.com), June 22, 2001.

I doubt that there is something special to 'german' glass. More important would be how they use glass to make lenses. Look at Kirk Tuck's Leica review on photo.net: he uses a Leica M6/Nikon LS 4000 combination to get very convincing results. Now Nikon has even ED glass in their scanner lenses, which makes their telephotos so nice (180/2.8, 300/4). But I can't say for sure if that also improves a scanner significantly.

-- Dietmar Moeller (moeller@phys.columbia.edu), June 22, 2001.

How much is that Glycee printer again?

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), June 22, 2001.

Tony, the Glycee printers I have seen are in the $100,000.00 (CDN) price range. It's about the size of a large office desk and is technically an inkjet printer (why people get the prints from these mixed up with the Epsons and such). It uses quart size bottles of pigment (four color plus black) but instead of laying down droplets of ink (again like the standard inkjet printers), it actually has 5 spray heads much like an airbrush. Virtually perfect color and no inkdrop size to worry about. But no one makes a home version so they are pretty much a custom lab piece of equipment. A lot of artists, painters as well as photographers use them to make high quality limited edition prints, but as I stated earlier, at a high price.

-- Bob Todrick (bobtodrick@yahoo.com), June 22, 2001.