Use of UK Photo in Stockport for scanning

[nickl]

I sent ten half-plate size film negs off to UK Photo for scanning, and I'm quite pleased with the results. They were only £1 each to scan at three resolutions (1200, 2400 & 3200) plus £3 postage. They use an Epson V850 for large format. The lowest resolution looks to be sufficient for most of my purposes. I took the view that at £900 to buy a V850 scanner it would take me a long, long time to break even. Martin Henson's very informative video on scanning also made me think that there might be quite a lot of post-processing to do - something I didn't really want to spend a lot of time learning.

The example result has been resized to 2425x1729 pixels. The clock face detail is at 1200 dpi.

 

[Reginald S.]

The egg seems to have loss contrast?

 

[David M]

?

 

[nickl]

Which egg? ...no egg in the photo !

 

[Terry Jones]

Would that be “neg”?

 

[nickl]

Ah yes. Makes sense now.
The lens used was a TTH Primoplane of about 1915 vintage. That possibly won't help the contrast on the negative, but I haven't really tried longer developing to see how much effect that would have (FOMA100 film, typically dev. in ID-11 for 8½ mins). There was no post-processing in the above scans.

Although I would rather have the contrast in the negative rather than obtain it by post-processing, I've found the Microsoft photo editor can give a quick one touch re-balancing of contrast values: