Ideal Film Scanning: What the Research Says and What the Math Shows EN
In film photography forums, the same question keeps coming back: what light do you actually need to scan a negative “correctly”? From there it turns into an argument about CRI 99, about 660 nm LEDs, about how Frontier skin tones look alive while Noritsu looks plastic — or the other way around, depending on who’s talking. What’s always bothered me about this argument is how few actual numbers are in it. So I worked through six primary research works from 2018–2026 — peer-reviewed papers, conference work, and the foundational 2018 scanner-interaction report — checked the numbers against the source text, and then sat down with the published data to calculate the things the papers mostly describe in words. ...