After recieving borderline results from a professional film scan in the last post, I took the same negative to be scanned at Wellington Photo Warehouse, another local store.

The scan quality this time around was significantly better. The scan was delivered at the same resolution in both JPEG and TIFF (8-bit, but still nice to have), and it cost just $5 - one third of the price per frame compared to the previous store! Here's the result:

The delivered JPEG file has no EXIF data so I don't know what equipment this was scanned on, but the guy I talked to on the phone before going in said they didn't use a drum scanner or flatbed. He described it as a "transmission scanner" with a light source on one side of the film and a CCD on the other, though that doesn't narrow down the equipment.

Detail-wise, I'd be happy to scan negatives in bulk at this store if I was going to pay someone to do it. My DSLR scan (left) still appears to have resolved a little more detail, but this professional scan is very close (center). Certainly a lot closer than the previous professional scan (right):

The crop of both professional scans was about the same at 5% loss of the exposure vertically and horizontally. I don't know what the industry standard crop is for printing 6x4's, but I suspect it's something around this number for practical reasons. I digitally cropped the DSLR scan as close to the edges of the exposure as possible, which is kind of cheating:

It would be nice to have this negative scanned on some other professional equipment to continue comparisons, but with the results I have so far I'm happy that this DSLR + macro lens setup at least matches the resolving power of the equipment I'd otherwise be paying per frame to use.

Next up I have to sort my colours out.