On 19/04/2017 9:44 @wiz, -hh wrote:

I raise this point because for a lot of my old UW photography images,
the local ("next day") E6 processing was done by hand and you got
back the uncut strip, unmounted (the service of slide mounting simply
wasn't offered at these dive resorts & Liveaboards,

But because the overall photgraphic yield was also typically quite low,
it wasn't considered to be a particularly big deal for the photographer
to spend an hour at a light box and cutting up the strips by hand and
hand-mounting the ~4 keepers per roll. Plus, it was slightly cheaper.

I can so relate to that. Most of my UW film stuff was slides taken back
in early 80s and I had to do a LOT of fiddling to scan them to an
acceptable level. One thing I found was that the more time I spent
cleaning them up with dedicated film cleaner chemicals, the less time I
wasted fixing things during scanning and post-processing.
Some slides were hopelessly gone, like most of the Agfa stuff.
But the Ekta64 and Kodachrome and Fuji stuff lasted sufficient time for
me to make good scans off them.


My brother has one of these and their general appeal is similar to
the slide projector process I mentioned: they're a "quick & dirty".
For some people (& uses) that's adequate, but when the user is more
meticulous, there's going to be a lot of time spent in post-processing
no matter what, so starting with a better scan becomes more beneficial.

Couldn't agree more!
I tried flatbeds and the digital sensor scanners and found that only the
Coolscan9000 and the Opticfilm120 gave me truly satisfactory results for
most of the time, although at a huge time investment from my part.
Still got a Primefilm 3600 which I use for quick and dirty stuff when I
don't have time to do everything in the other two. It's quite good in
that its transport mechanism keeps the film reasonably flat but the only
software worthwile using with it is vuescan.