Originally posted by edl Thanks Nesster for posting those links.
I found "Scanning 101" to be helpful (go ahead and laugh) so just as a test, I re-scanned a 6x6 Ilford FP4 at 1200dpi, 2400dpi, 3200dpi, and 4800dpi on my Epson V500. The resulting TIFF's ended up around 13, 45, 140, and 340MB's.
ICE was turned off.
Detail continued to improve as the dpi's went up, but what made more difference was properly adjusting the black and white points, and adjusting curves for higher contrast. I have very little PP skill so that wasn't surprising.
Of course, it's a low-end flatbed scanner, and I don't think its 4800dpi output would rival 1200dpi from a real film scanner. But it's good enough for web sharing.
Just my 0.02.
its not even which scanner is what, its about native DPI, what the scanner was *designed* for
anything outside the native DPI is a combination of software and hardware downsampling, just like shooting a 10mp jpeg using a K20D, when the native resolution is 14 and the output is RAW.
by scanning at native DPI, you are capturign the maximum detail the sensor can produce.
the reason (and i'm theorizing), flatbed scanners have incrased DPI compared to dedicated scanners, is the same idea behind a 10 megapixle point and shoot vs a 6 megapixle DSLR.
however, if your computer has the resources to process 300-400 mb tiff files, then you could down-sample after the fact, since something like photoshop has a much better re-sizing algorithem than Vuescan or whatever.