As a follow-on from the last post, I took the tortoiseshell cat negative to be scanned professionally at a local business. After a week of waiting, I eagerly went to pick it up today - they'd sent it to a different location to do the super-high resolution scan, so the wait was longer than usual.

According to the EXIF data, the scan was made with a Fuji SP-3000, which is a fairly well regarded piece of equipment. I held my breath and opened the file, ready to be blown away by a superior scan...and was pretty disappointed:

I'm not concerned with the different colour - the original image has a strong yellow cast from the sunset, so it was probably corrected automatically or manually with good intent. The problem is that while this image looks alright scaled down, at 100% it's lacking a lot of detail compared to the DSLR scan:

I initially thought this might be partly caused by JPEG compression as the file provided was only 6MB, but had to save my DSLR scan at 0% JPEG quality to get a similar looking result:

What next?

I've contacted another local store that I've seen decent scans from in the the last few years when getting film developed. I'll take this same negative in to be scanned tomorrow and see if we can get a better result from them.

Continued in "Professional scan comparison (part II)".