In the fall of 2013 I went out with several film cameras and a digital Canon EOS-M. I took shots of different scenes with the cameras. I had the film developed at Dwayne's Photo. I compared five different methods of scanning the film images:
All images were resized to be approximately eight megapixels (3600 pixels on the long side) because I figure that this is about all the resolution that can be extracted from consumer grade 35mm negatives.
Note: Don't pay much attention to color differences in the samples below. I attempted to make each image have plausible color, but I didn't attempt to match colors. This page is for examining resolution, not color matching.
For reference, this is the scene shot with a Canon EOS-M. The goal was to convert the negative so that it has as much detail (as possible) as the image from the EOS-M. So first we look at the EOS-M version.
Shot with Canon EOS-M
Canon EOS-M 100% crop
The rest of the images were scanned with the above described methods.
Camera scanned with Canon 60D 100% crop
Camera scanned with Canon G9 100% crop
Scanned with a Plustek 7600i 100% crop
Scanned with an Epson V600 100% crop
Scanned with a Wolverine F2D 100% crop
Canon EOS-M
Camera scanned with Canon 60D
Camera scanned with Canon G9
Scanned with a Plustek 7600i
Scanned with an Epson V600
Scanned with a Wolverine F2D
Zip file that contains the above images, at eight megapixels. About 17 megs.
When I created the above examples I tried to make each image look its best. I cloned out all the dings and scratches I could see. But when I looked closely at the 100% crop of the Plustek 7600i image, I noticed that there were scratches in the branches that I hadn't seen when I cloned out scratches in the sky. I was curious how dings and scratches showed up when a camera scan from my 60D was compared to a scan with my Plustek 7600i.
So I scanned the same image again. First with my 7600i and again with my 60D. And didn't clone out any scratches. I put the results on SmugMug because SmugMug lets you scroll around in high resolution images better than I can do on this site. Note when you examine these images that I scanned the 60D image after the 7600i image.
Questions? Write to camerascanning@frogymandias.org