My Darkroom is finally set up for enlarging 35mm. Off to a slow start, but I am already loving the process. Ideally I would print everything through the enlarger, but I am too slow. It took a few hours to fine tune one print and make a few copies, although with practice I can imagine making far more prints per session.
I have been curious over the quality of flatbed scanning 8x10 darkroom prints vs scanned negatives. Most information I found online seemed to suggest scanning the negatives is obviously better yet little to no testing was done, it was just passed off as common sense. To me this didn’t seem right as my Epson V700 scanned 35mm is just about acceptable, and this scanner is around the top or at least not a million miles off the better consumer scanners for film.
I’ve seen many 35mm enlarged prints and thought the quality and detail where impressive, impressive enough to be an order of magnitude better than anything my Epson was capable of scraping from a negative. Darkroom enlargers are just perfected to make enlarged prints from a negative. The number of companies trying to promote various DSLR copy stand setup gizmos for digitizing negs and YouTube film novices trying to give expert scanning advice, it’s a bit of a minefield. But anyway, From my own rather uneducated experience; the prints shit all over scanned negatives, there I said it!. Certainly not as convenient, but for pure quality, I'd go for scanned prints over home scanning.
I’m also loving the warmtone paper.
First image is a Epson V700 Film Scan. Second Image a Epson V700 Scan of the print.
