scanning film with sd quattro

Artemka wrote:

Being new to this forum, i would like to say greetings first. I've shot several sigma cameras during the past years, including sigma dp1m, dp3m, dp2x, mostly in monochrome and have always been astounded by the advantage they give over conventional Bayer pattern cameras.

However.

For the past several months i got hooked on film and now i rarely touch my digitals...

My usual workflow is as follows - BW film -> Fuji X-E1 w/ macro -> dcraw linear 16 bit TIFF -> inverted in Silverfast Negafix or manually inverted and tweaked in PS. I usually make one shot scans for online use and 4 shots stitch for a 6x4.5 negative which I intend to print. By stitching 4 shots I think I can go as far as the grain structure of the film. That is, with Bayer quality. Intended printing size is up to 24" at 300dpi.

My question towards the technically minded people here:

1. How big would be the advantage of replacing the Fuji X-E1 with Sigma SD (H) Quattro?

I don't know. I have never seen a Fuji digital camera.

2. How big is the importance of a quality macro optic. Sigma SA is surprisingly hard to find over here (in Europe), so I've narrowed my choices to Sigma 105/2.8 APO or something like Nikkor 55mm/2.8 AIS with adapters (Nikon F->M42, M42->SA).

I think the lens is very important. I am using the Olympus OM 80mm macro bellows lens with the sdQH and early results look very promising. This lens is specifically designed for digitising film. You need to find an equally good lens, with flat field at around half life size. I find f/8 is the best aperture to use.

I have only done 35mm B&W negs so far. I will try to find time to test the setup on 120 film soon.

3. Inverting negatives requires a linear raw file which can be inverted before gamma is applied. Is there any way to get a raw linear file from a Sigma? No option in SPP as far as I know. Since I am interested in Luminocity only, there might be third party converters that can do a decent job?

The sdQH, and soon the sdQ, can save DNG files. These can be bulk loaded into Adobe Camera Raw, so I can convert 30 or so images to monochrome positives in one go. If you are doing colour negs, you would of course skip the mono step.

Irfanview can also do bulk inversion, as an option in its comprehensive mass conversion section.

The grain is there.