>>4302742>>>4302696>Is this digital noise in those white bricks over the tank, to the left, or is blown out in the film itself?>>4302770>do think that is the film,It's not noise, but it is a digital artifact, essentially highlight clipping. The ancient scanner he's using is unable to blast through the bricked highlights where his B&W film is over-exposed/over-developed.
That's what a "d-Max" rating shows; how dense a slide/neg can be, as measured with a densitometer, before the scanner can't accurately discern tonal gradation.
With camera scanning, especially if you're using a flash, you don't run into this kind of limitation so quickly, because you can just turn up the exposure.
>>4302710This scan is showing noise (ie where the input to the scanner is the same but the output varies randomly) likely because the neg is too thin/underexposed and the curve applied to get a full scale of tone is too steep, exaggerating the read noise. If anything this highlights the limitations of these old-tech potato scanners more than the other ones; they use a (old-tech, noise prone) CCD line scanner and step it across the face of the film with a motor. With anything less than perfect negs going in, or even with a good neg trying to do a heavy edit, you show up these issues.
Pic related shows an *extremely* thin neg (dead developer), that I was still able to get a terrible image out of because the camera file is so clean. The speckles are from hard water, the halo around the edge is actually the flash illumination falloff.