More on the Film Scanner.
Without doing much, scanning a 35mm slide at 16 bit resolution without changing anything else gets you a 120M TIFF file. Yes, 120M, as in 122,927,684 bytes. Seems like a lot for a single picture, doesn’t it?
So, I started to look at the sizes for other cameras and what to expect. First off, some comparisons between the scanner, a Canon S500 5MP camera, and an older Kodak 2M camera.
| Camera | Pixel dimensions (landscape) | DPI | Page dimensions (inches) | File size (K) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kodak DC280 2 MegaPixel | 1760×1168 | 192dpi | 9.167×6.083 | 453K |
| Canon S500 5 MegaPixel | 1944×2592 | 180dpi | 10.8×14.4 | 2,282K |
| Nikon Coolscan 5000ED 35mm scan TIFF | 5587×3675 | 4000dpi | 1.397×0.919 | 122,927K |
| Nikon Coolscan 5000ED 35mm scan JPG | 5587×3675 | 4000dpi | 1.397×0.919 | 7,894K |
The key takeaway here is how impressive the JPG compression is… from 122M to under 8M — very nice! So, I’m busy scanning things to save as JPEG now, and I’ll be down-converting the few rolls of TIFFs I did into JPEGs…. should compress nicely.
The scanner dimensions are also weird…. that matters is the pixel density. The DPI and size of the page are just arbitrary… say I divide DPI by 4 to 1,000… then I can double the length and width of the image. Whatever.