Kelly,

Some skeptics who seem to consider themselves purists seem to like to make claims that the CCD pixel count of some scanners are less than they are. But if a particular scanner maker did falsify the pixel count specification that fact could easily be established and the manufacturer could be held to criminal false advertising charges very readily. The author of the screed you referred me to provided NO evidence whatsoever to back up the claims made in his document. Results of scans is not evidence of anything but performance by a particular user of the scanner, which may or may not be particularly skilled.

And any competent technician can take a scanner apart and with the aid of a magnifier make a physical count of the number of CCD sensor sites the scanner contains.

The fact is some recent flatbed scanners with film scanning capability that have quite high optical resolution specifications achieve that with the use of 6 or 12 line CCD arrays. There is a good reason for this strategy. If a very high resolution 3 line CCD array were made the individual sensor sites would be extremely small, and small sensor sites are less light sensitive, so the scan speed would have to be reduced to a crawl (an example of this is the Microtek ArtixScan 2500 which has a 3 line CCD sensor that is 2500 ppi resolution, and another professional flatbed of the same era, Umax, that had a 3 line 3000ppi resolution sensor). Imacon gets around this by using a larger CCD sensor array with a complex optical mechanical system, which is why its highest resolution scanner is $20,000.00

Some seem to think that parallel 6 or 12 line CCD arrays are in some way cheating and that interpolation is used, but the technology is based on very modern micro-lens technology like that used with the newest digital camera sensors, and firmware compositing, not interpolation.

Granted, there are some quality compromises with the newest multi line CCD sensor scanners like the Epson Perfection V700 and V750M Pro, but they are offset by some positive scan quality attributes as well as very fast high resolution scan speeds.

As to what resolution to scan at, with 35mm film originals using the scanner's maximum optical resolution to make a high-bit raw scan provides the most information and hence the best scan image quality. You can always downsample a large file to make a smaller size print or other output, easily and quickly.

Thank you David!

Kelly