I had a lab owner emphatically contend that.."positive film of the same ISO has finer grain than negative film". Didn't address b&w.
It's been a couple of years since I've made much use of 35mm films, so take this with a grain of salt....
In general, slow transparency film is less grainy than negative film. A good ISO 100 or 50 slide film will usually beat even the best ISO 100 negative film. At ISO 200, some transparency films hold their own, but most are as grainy or worse than print film. At ISO 400 print films generally beat slide, with the exception of Fuji's Provia 400 which seems to match or beat most ISO 400 negative films.
You have to consider several factors when deciding slide vs print film.
In the past, work flow issues drove a lot of people to slide film, just as work flow issues drive a lot of people to digital. For printers and publishers slide film was a "what you see if what you get" set up, so it was easier to work with and therefore more in demand for publication photography. Digital is even better in the workflow department, and a lot of the reasons for shooting digital are workflow, rather than image quality, related.
Print film also has much greater exposure latitude than slide film. This was more or less a mute point with legacy processing, where the color photo paper had latitude more or less on par with slide film. But with scanning, that increase in latitude can be a real boon.
We happened to be reviewing a b&w print at the time and their existed a situation wherein the subject couldn't be pursued (customers waiting). I've since emailed him for a follow-up on his recommendation that "b&w film be scanned as positive film".
I scan all my B&W film as positive and then reverse it in Photoshop. For me, that is simply a way of circumventing some of the brain dead adjustments that the scanning software makes to the image. I also push the histogram end points out so nothing is clipped and all detail is captured. It would seem that a properly configured scanning program would be able to handle B&W film as B&W. Vuescan does a pretty good job in that regard. But both the software with my Canon scanner and Epson flat bed really clip the histogram and screw up contrast when scanning B&W negs when set for B&W negs. When scanning as slide film both softwares seem to make minimal - or no - adjustments - leaving the screwing up part to me. :-0
FWIW - traditional B&W is a whole nother mindset than either slide film or color neg (or digital). With all of the latter there is pretty tight range of exposure at which the film will work. Yes, you can push or pull slide film or color negs, and you can adjust the exposure of a digital RAW file considerably, but with traditional B&W you have really broad latitude to push or pull the film via development, and can then tweak it a lot in scanning and printing. I use some old, toy, and/or junk cameras with fixed shutter speeds and F-stops, and control exposure entirely through development of the neg. It's amazing how far you can take things when you get creative with B&W chemistry - time, temperature, and agitation are all things that you can modify to control development.
MCC
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, MI
www.markcassino.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
