Printable View
Hello All,
Epson has recently announced a brand new scanner that is suitable for LF users. Here's the link for the press release.
http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/story_688.html
Any thoughts on it? Comparison with the 3200? Good/Bad? Whatever....
Cheers
It is still early days. Someone posted some scans of a 35 mm negative recently which were not too impressive. It looked as if it didn't do much better than the 3200. But it could have been the transparency or the scanning technique. We shall have to wait for more people to test it.
I find my 3200 more than adequate for most things I want to do with 4 x 5, so I'm sure the new scanner will also be adequate. It should allow at least 6 X magnification without loss of significant detail. I would be surprised if it did much better than that, but you can never tell. The real question is whether it will be adequate for 35 mm, and I would be surprised also if that were the case.
The scanner has ICE, or scratch removal functionality. Will it work for B&W ? My understanding is that ICE uses the Infra-Red channel, which works OK for color....but not for B&W ?
Besides the larger scanning area (5x7 !) and ICE, which are great,
I am not expecting a significant improvement over the 3200.
Here
is the comparison by Andreas.
Note that I found that using the search function on
this site by typing epson 4870.
I appears that thanks to Tom's last changes, Google is now indexing each
of the pages of this forum !
I guess I'll wait and get this instead of getting the 3200 sooner, but I still won't expect it to fill high-end scanning needs. Now then, if Imacon were to come out with a 4x5 scanner for under a grand...
David: Imacon may not come with a new scanner for <$1000 but Microtek is coming out with a flat bed scanner that is glassless for trannies for which it claims a 4.2 DMAx. Scanners manufacturers are quite used to hype but so are we, the users, so getting excited is premature, time will tell. The Microtek is twice as heavy as the Epson if that is any indication of intensions and has a dual system for reflective/transparencies. It is expected to land at $1000 for the pro version with ICE and Silverfast 6Ai. I'd wait until both are out and can be compared. QT I did look at the site, and Henry I did look at the announcement, sorry for being cynical but there is rather superficial with not much technical content to it.
Julio - sounds very interesting. Any idea when the Microtek is due out?
Of course, the Microtek won't have a 4.2 Dmax. Even most of the drum scanner manufacturers and high-end CCD scanners don't claim such a number. If the ridiculous resolution claims of Epson cast a doubt on their scanners, so does such a Dmax claim of Microtek. I also bet wet-scanning with kami fluid on a glass would give better results than glassless. Last, it would seem that ICE on the Microtek would work only for prints, not transparencies.