aerius wrote:
Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:
If there's one thing I must say about Afga Vista film, is that the colors certainly give an interesting vintage look. Of course, resolution is rather low with this film.
Which ISO version of the film are you using? Going by the manufacturer's tech sheets as well as
this chart, Vista 100 should have pretty good resolution. The higher speed versions aren't as sharp but they're still up there compared to other films of the same speed.
1. AgfaPhoto Vista 200 and 400 films sold in stores now are actually Fujifilm Superia. The AgfaPhoto factory in Leverkusen closed down in 2006 and the stocks of real Agfa Vista film ran out already in 2009 in most places. The only "real" Agfa films available now are Precisa CT 100 slide film and APX 100 & 400 B&W in some places, although the B&W films have been mostly sold out as well, and the availability of the Precisa slide films was always spotty outside of Europe. So anyways, if your film was bought in 2010, there is a good chance it is Superia, which is an okay film, but I thought you should know this. What do the film edge markings say?
2. You are using a Canoscan 9000F scanner, so low resolution is the order of the day. The true optical resolution of the 8600F/8800F/9000F series scanners is only 1800-2000 ppi, which means that you will only get about 5 MP worth of information at best, and actually less than that due to interesting scanning phenomena like grain aliasing. If it's any consolation, there is actually a Finnish photography magazine that compared images scanned with the Canoscan 8800F from 645 MF film with DSLR images and declared that MF film can't compete even with 12 MP DSLRs in resolution. That made my eyes rolling so bad it still hurts

Oh, lab scans. Any lab that uses flatbed CanoScans is BS. Epson V700 is the absolute minimum quality I would accept. Most good labs actually used minilab accessory scanners like Fujifilm SP-3000, which is pretty good. Real pro scans are usually more expensive, though, because they are slower and more labor intensive to do; there is no way to fully automate work flow with a Nikon 9000 or Flextight, let alone drum scanners.