Transitioning to next steps in my testing.
TLDR: for 35mm B&W - PShift is nice for truly huge prints, not necessary otherwise. I am glad I did this, but also wish I’d paired it with a good color neg or especially slide. I’ve only gotten part of the story here. My flat Tmax400 image was great for showing silver grains but didn’t push the sensor’s or technique’s limits at all I fear. So lets set aside the idea that we can achieve large sizes with this. That part is clear to me. Now to test color and larger formats!
The details are one thing… but capturing the RGB and then properly interpreting it for final output is important. As is stitching-free medium and large format scanning.
Otherwise why else do people keep old scanners going if not to get those full RGB files and resolution? Right?! The way people still talk about drum scanners and Imacons as if they are still the end all be all, I’d think there would be interest in fully testing PShift’s limits for scanning. Those devices just record the analog as pixels, too. And we all know camera scanning is so much faster. So it comes down to: repeatability, resolution, sharpness and RGB interpretation.
I figure if big institutions are camera scanning large volumes nearly exclusively now – so should I.
So for special images (not every image!), I want to push to the limits, which I would define as being beyond the practical, typical uses (and because we do not know what the future holds).
Additionally, Pixel Shift dynamic range sees a theoretical boost above their base ISO standard, too, which I suspect would be most obvious in much more dense, contrasty images like slides vs my flat Tmax400 example. There is a chart below and it was linked above. @LABlueBike showed this quite readily in his example from Post 32. I don’t think it was a fluke because I’ve watched this a few times now recently. I think it is illuminating to the discussion here.
Video linked straight to the examples (35mm through 6x9) but the explanation up front is nice for those that want the basics.
In my experience digitizing tens of thousands of slides, linear color profiles paired with wider dynamic range does wonders for transparencies and any boost to that range is a useful one on the most extreme examples. For example, my jump to the R5 from a 5D3 was magical in this regard. Prior to the R5 I never found camera scanned slides pleasing. So finding more DR can only help and the less I move the sliders in post, the cleaner the final output, with or without Pixel Shift. So I want to test if I can find more DR economically. A Phase One and even a Hasselblad or Fuji is a bigger investment.
Cheers y’all