Scanner settings for prints

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I've had a good read around and still cant seem to ind what I'm after.

I've just bought a V500 and have a fair amount of old pictures to scan (mainly 5x4 but a few a little bigger and some quite small really old ones)

I have been trying the following settings

professional mode
24 bit color
600dpi
output as Tiff

This gives me a file size of about 15meg. Are these settings ok for archiving?

Also when doing B&W prints should i swop to 16 greyscale?

thanks
 
I would consider upping the DPI a little, you'd be surprised how much detail is in a print.
 
If you scan at 600 dpi and want to print out at 300 dpi you will only get an print that is 4 times the size of your negative. I would scan negatives at a much higher resolution unless you only want to see them on a screen.

Mike
 
If you scan at 600 dpi and want to print out at 300 dpi you will only get an print that is 4 times the size of your negative. I would scan negatives at a much higher resolution unless you only want to see them on a screen.

Mike

He is scanning prints, for negatives you'd want around 1200 up depending on the quality of the camera.



i think thats for printing ,as opposed to scanning

Yeah, but the scanner can't get any detail that wasn't originally laid down. So if the printers max resolution is 300 dpi them that's all that can be scanned. No?
 
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Yeah, but the scanner can't get any detail that wasn't originally laid down. So if the printers max resolution is 300 dpi them that's all that can be scanned. No?

Remember that theres no '300 dpi' for optical prints as their chemical not digital based so in theory resolution is infinite (but in reality not as the grain etc of both the negative and the paper limits the resolution) - modern wet prints done using a laser or LEDs are around 300DPI simply because its a high enough level for detail when looking closely at the print without it getting insanely expensive for the equipment; in theory higher printer DPI's could be better and print more detail but on the small sized prints that most use its unlikely that any difference would be noticeable.

For prints up to 1200 DPI is usual as higher the file size gets ridiculous and its unlikely any more detail will be resolved. For negatives/slides 4000DPI is seen as the standard as that will resolve all the detail in the great majority of films (except for specialist technical films such as Technical Pan which can hold much more detail) although it is highly variable with colour negative films usually having a little less detail than B&W and slide films. I have a copy of an article somewhere where the relative resolution of different film types was compared and presented as DPI, I'll try and dig that out.
 
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