What is the best scanner for 35mm black and white negatives to print high quality fine art digital prints?

Question

I'm not interested in the cheapest, but the best - high quality to produce fine art photographs on a digital printer and relatively easy to use.

Answer 1

The best scan method possible is a high resolution drum scan. Have the lab scan the image at the highest resoluton the scanner can give - this could be like 5K dpi. They'll say 300 is enough, but doing a master scan and then sizing down always yeilds a better product. Also scan in 16 bits. These cost at least $40/scan. A&I in Los Angeles, The New Lab in San Francisco and West Coast Imaging all will understand your request.

Can't afford that"? (Who can?)=A Nikon 4000 tabletop film scanner is the best way to go. Flatbed scanners with transparency adapters are not actually designed to scan film. Scan at the highest dpi = 4000 and in 16 bits. Save as Tiff file. copy file and work on copy. When you are finished save this as the master file for this image.
When you are ready to print duplicate the image and resize to 300 or 350 dpi. (You ever make gravy? You get better flavor from using consume or stock than water. This is the logic behind the massive resolution of the scan.) Because you have a master file in 4000 dpi, you can size the image any way you want, whenever and print it at 300/350 (or whatever as the technology changes.) You never have to retouch the image again. Saves a ton of work over time.

Print on an epson r2400-developed and optimized for fine b/w
printing.

Have fun.

Answer 2

To get true B&W the store must use B&W paper - NOT color paper. And since no stores these days HAVE B&W paper (it's very expensive!), you're always going to get a color cast. Why? Because the equipment tried to blend color inks with black ink to come up with true black. And it simple doesn't work - as you've just discovered. Some will be better than others, of course. But think of it this way: whatever color cast you get on a B&W reprint, that's how far out of calibration the store's printing equipment is that day. One day it might be green, the next it'll be magenta. Shutterfly can give you good B&W results because they're using the best printing equipment AND their people know what they're doing. Box store (Target, WalMart, etc.) equipment is low quality. And they use the least expensive paper and chemistry to keep prices down - and maximize their profit! Plus, their personnel seldom know anything about the technical aspects of digital printing. In short, you get what you pay for! You'd get much better - albeit more expensive - B&W reproduction by going to a specialty printer that has high end inkjet printers (Epsons, for example) which use multiple black inks.

Answer 3

It may not be so much the scanner you choose, as the printer. Cheaper printers can give a slight cast to b&w prints. You need to go for one - like the more expensive Epsons - which had a dedicated photographic b&w printing cycle, or replace all the inks with photographic b&w inks, keeping a printer dedicated to that work.

Answer 4

I have an HP ScanJet 5370C with a 6 x 6" neg scanner.

Very easy to use, scans to 1200 dpi, B/W, color, vector, raster, OCR. I've had it for 4 years, scanned thousands of negs and transp., and it's still going strong.

The only disappointment I had -- and it wasn't the scanner's fault: I scanned negatives from an old pocket camera. The film was typically grainy and in that extremely small format. Yuck!

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