Repeating something I have said before:
2,700 dpi (which just happens to be the resolution of the lowest
quality, oldest "good" Nikon film scanners, the LS-2000 and the LS-30)
gives you a 10 megapixel scan of a 35mm image.
It is VERY doubtful that ANY higher resolution will really capture any
additional actual information.
At 10 megapixels, you can see film grain in many if not most 35mm films.
For typical non-professional images, shot with real world cameras
(good consumer SLRs, but not multi-thousand dollar high end cameras), on
consumer film, with consumer processing and focusing and exposure
settings made either automatically by the camera or by a
non-professional, there just isn't much more, if any more than 10
megapixels of actual information in the 35mm image.
So yes, later scanners can scan at 3,200 and 4,000 and 5,000 and even
6,400 dpi. But all that you will accomplish, in most cases, will be to
make the process much slower and to make the resulting file sizes
dramatically larger with no actual benefit in terms of real image
quality. Once most 35mm images get to 10 megapixels (and actually, for
most of them, even 6 or 8 megapixels), you really have most of the
useable information contained in the image. Beyond 10 megapixels, for
the most part, additional resolution servers no useful purpose and in
fact is counterproductive for most purposes.
Scanners vary, as I said my scanner does a good job at 3200 at 4800
the scans looked almost the same and it took substantially longer to
do the scan. But on 35mm b&w negs I get good grain, not over blown,
and good detail at 3200ppi. Worth testing definitely. Nikon does have
a 50 slide holder, but if any of your slides are in cardboard mounts,
it sticks like crazy, from experience, plastic mounts are OK.
Tom
