And that is an insane amount of grain... I was hoping it would perform better at ISO-400. Maybe you should apply some noise reduction in LightRoom, since you don't have a proper dark room to fiddle with.
Well, it's all about the film and the rolls I've started with have been old, way past their expiration date. Just yesterday I scanned a roll of old color negative film, iso200, I think the expiration date was somewhere around the year 2002 (?) and I have no idea where it's been kept (film preserves better when kept in a cold dry place), so it was rather..."crunchy"
Grainy as hell.
And as for the post processing, I'm now scanning with Vuescan (Minolta's own software is ooooold and a pain in the ass to use) and I save the scans as tiffs, then I run them through photoshop.
The grain level looks more like the noise at 1600. Oh, i love the way yours looks, far better than digital noise.
Film grain looks a lot more natural than noise, so you could say analog > digital
How is the focusing with it, btw? Does it have AF or is everything done manually? I don't think my eyesight is good enough (even with dioptre adjustment) to focus properly, especially with that shallow DOF. I look forward to seeing more, maybe next time with fresh film?
You mean focusing with the camera? Well the F601 has AF, so it's rather easy with it
But it can do manual focus as well, it has the same kind of "digital rangefinder" that's found in Nikon DSLR's: there's this little green dot in the lower left corner in the viewfinder which lits up when the camera thinks the focus is in place. And being a film camera, the viewfinder is somewhat bigger than in DSLR's, so it's really not that difficult to focus manually even without the green dot.
On the other hand, the Nikon FE I have is manual focus only, but it has a "Split-Image rangefinder / Microprism system" focusing screen, so it's actually very easy to see the focus from the viewfinder.
