So! I eventually put together enough pennies to purchase a Nikon CoolscanII negative scanner. Although getting reasonable results is easy, the more I practised the more I realised that it was possible to improve on the quality of scans no end. Even now (four years later) I am still learning new tweaks. One of the first things I found was that the scanner prefers under-exposed negatives. The image on the left was not only thin but contained the proverbially difficult ‘snow’.