Quality from scanning and printing slides?

[Sausage]

I understand there's no way to directly make prints from slides now, so we have to scan the slides and send the files for printing.

Which means we're using the computer's color space for processing.

What I'm interested in knowing is, will the prints retain the same vibrancy as the original slide? I don't think so, since we're limited to sRGB color space. So does this mean the only way to retain the vibrancy is to just display it from a projector?

 

[Verywierd]

Naturally a scanned slide will not be exactly like a projected one, but if done using a good scanner (I use a Nikon Coolscan 4) the result is not too bad. The image below was scanned from a Fujichrome slide:

http://gallery.clubsnap.com/showphoto.php/photo/27078/cat/500/ppuser/20492

 

[Verywierd]

Here's another scanned slide (also Fujichrome)

http://gallery.clubsnap.com/showphoto.php/photo/27296/cat/500/ppuser/20492

 

[Zerstorer]

What I'm interested in knowing is, will the prints retain the same vibrancy as the original slide? I don't think so, since we're limited to sRGB color space. So does this mean the only way to retain the vibrancy is to just display it from a projector?

Yes...but necessarily.

Firstly, a print will hardly ever match the vibrancy of a slide viewed against light. This is just the difference between reflected and transmitted light media(athough the Durst Lambda and Cibachrome prints I used to see at Spectracolorlab looked pretty darn good.

You can scan in wider colourspaces such as ProPhoto, CIELab or WideRGB but the key question is whether it is really needed in most cases. The majority of subjects photographed might actually fall within the gamut of AdobeRGB and hence, going to wider gamuts(and sacrificing tonal graduation) might not actually be feasible or necessary.

If you are printing from Minilab machines, sRGB is usually what they are limited to and but it already gives a pretty good result as long as you do a little tweaking after scanning. The most important part is to get your scan right first before worrying about the print.

Some sample scans, E100GX, Provia100F, E100VS.