On the Imacon Flextight 949

When we scan your negs or transparencies, they are first cleaned using compressed air. The compressed air removes major dust particles, but film often has a slight static charge and some times dust stubbornly sticks to the surface. We DO NOT wipe your photos as the risk of scratching is too great - if your film is dirty (and a lot of film is, take a really good look at your film), we suggest cleaning it with PEC-12 BEFORE sending it to us.

The cleaner you can get your transparencies to us, the better, of course!

Your storage and transport methods can make a big difference here, as can the quality of processing your lab does. In my personal experience as a professional photographer having film developed in Amsterdam, London, and Australia, I have unfortunately come to the conclusions that many Australian labs have poor quality control by world standards, especially when busy (some of the US and UK labs have amazing quality control, but also admittedly a much bigger market to support them). So even transparencies fresh from the lab can be surprisingly grubby under close inspection with a loupe - if you don't complain to your lab, they'll never get better!

On average, when supplied with a clean piece of film to scan, the result is an image that will need just 5 to 10 minutes of final spotting to be made ready for print. If you would like us to do this for you, we have a service for this.

On the Nikon

The Nikon has hardware based automatic dust and scratch removal.

This is the one area that the Nikon really excels in - the Digital ICE3 solution is remarkable and in 99% of all cases will leave you with a completely clean scan requiring absolutely no further spotting work. Really large scratches and fingerprints will not come out so well and will still require some manual work.

Contrary to popular web mythology, Digital ICE3 does NOT soften scans (and this is quite easily testable with two side by side scans that are pixel for pixel the same, except for dust!). Immediately around the dust itself there is very slight softening, almost always invisible to the eye under normal viewing, as is to be expected (the scanner interpolates the data where the dust was using the surrounding pixels). Digital ICE3 only works with colour dye based films - i.e. normal colour film like Velvia, Portra, and also chromagenic black and white films. It does not work with true black and white film (and film based on silver rather than dyes).