Scanner - is ICE/dust removal necessary?

Craigus

Craigus

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Craig
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Following my other thread about medium format (I appreciate all the help and suggestions) I've decided to stick with shooting more 35mm for the time being and doing some home developing and scanning. Picked up a nice Nikon FM with a 50mm 1.8 the other day and received the scans back of a test roll from filmdev yesterday, all seems good with the camera so I'm ready to start shooting some black and white and diving into the developing rabbit hole.

My question: Is a scanner with infrared or dust removal a big benefit? I'm leaning towards getting a Plustek scanner at the moment and probably buying Vuescan to use with it, but trying to decide between the 8100 or the 8200i which includes the scratch/dust reduction. I know I can't use that for black and white but I eventually want to develop colour at home and also be able to do some good quality scans of colour negatives that I'll get developed elsewhere.

Anyone feel strongly one way or the other? If I'm methodical and careful with the development process I would like to think any dust spots can be quickly removed in Photoshop as a final stage of the process? Or am I underestimating how annoying it can be?
 
It's not necessary but does make most colour scanning less of a PITA if the film's old, dusty and/or scratched. Of little or no use on traditional B&W films.
 
Worthwhile for colour generally. But if your film originals are well-handled and stored, and you dust them both sides immediately before the scan (you would do that anyway, I hope), there shouldn't be much spotting to do. I use a blower lens brush. Then if and as necessary, Photoshop's clone tool.
 
It's particularly useful if you have old negatives or slides that you want to scan. I have a 7500i (probably equivalent to your 8200i) but now rarely use the infrared. I mainly scan black and white, for which it's essentially no use (it sees silver grains as dust!!!), and get my C41 processed and scanned in lab (because colour correction is such a PITA), so it's only the rare occasions I shoot an E6 film (process only at the lab) that I use it. However, I've just found out I need to scan some 30 year old C41 so I suspect it'll be very useful for them. (No use for Kodachromes either, BTW.)
 
There is often so much dust involved with film scanning that a dust removal-feature should be nearly essential. That said, the quality of the dust removal capabilities of many scanners is not only questionable, but the dust removal process can even degrade image quality.

In the end, dealing with dust is one of a number of reasons that I have largely abandoned home scanning, preferring to let the lab deal with that headache. Now if I could figure out a way to get rid of dust in the darkroom too...
 
If you're scanning old negatives that have a lot of hard to remove dust, then ICE is probably helpful. For fresh negatives, I find it's easier to just try and minimise the dust when I scan and then clean up the bits that get through (and some ALWAYS does - no matter how much you prepare things beforehand) with the healing brush in Lightroom. ICE adds a lot of time to the scan in my experience, so it's not really worthwhile for me. Plus, I tend to shoot much more black and white than colour, and ICE doesn't work for B&W.
 
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