Epson 4870

[Martin Patek-Strutsky]

Has anyone had the chance to get some firsthand impressions of the new Epson 4870 scanner? The specs (http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=40524123) look quite promising: ICE, 4800dpi, Dmax 3.8, transparency unit 6" x 9".

Is it really so much better than the Epson 3200 or is this just marketing talk?

[Leonard Evens]

There is a review at www.photo-i.co.uk which shows examples. But it is a bit hard for me to tell if the 4870 is substantially better than the 3200 from them. My impression is that it isn't.

Going from 3200 ppi sampling resolution to 4800 ppi is more or less irrelevant for most large format photography purposes. According to digital scanning theory, the true photographic resolution which a scanner can capture is at most half the scanning resolution and in practice somewhat below that. The Epson 3200 seems to resolve about 28-30 lp/mm, which is about half of the 63 lp/mm that it would be theoretically capable of. Higher quality scanners, which are also much more expensive, come closer to their theoretical maximums. However, I find this more than adequate for 4 x 5, and I would guess the 4870 won't deliver much better.

Where the 4800 ppi might make a difference is in 35 mm scanning or even perhaps 645. but from looking at the examples in the review, it doesn't look to me as if it would be really adequate for that either. But look yourself and see what you think.

I suspect we will shortly have more systematic analyses of 4870 scans, so it might be sensible to wait.

[Yuri Saniko]

I'm using 4870 for about a week now. I can clearly see that resolution is better than 3200. Digital ICE works pretty good, saving a lot of time. Colors and contrast are nicer than 3200. I'm using scanner for 6x9 film size. I'm getting nice 16000x10000 scan, rescalling it in photoshop with unsharp masking downt to 8000x5000 (50%), and image quality is pretty good. I have very fast PC - dual Xeon 2.66 with 2gb of ram, but even with this computer it is hard to work with 6x9 scans at 4800dpi.

I can imagine file size if you will want to scan 4"x5" at 4800dpi - it will be about 1.3Gb... Make sure you have at least 4gb of ram for Photoshop ;)

[Dutchman]

Yuri, what film do you use?