Silverfast value?

[ronald moravec]

Just got an Epson 4870 to scan 4x5 for inkjet prints. It seems to work great as does my Minolta 5400 for 35mm.

I scanned some Bergger developed for a condenser enlarger and Portra 160 vc 4x5. It went thru Photoshop Elements 2 to brighten up the sky and the prints are very nice. I put it a photofile directly so I could save it at 16 bit rather than have Elements convert it up front to 8.

Silverfast SE cme with the Epson and their own software. The Silverfast is installed and has all kinds of bells and whistles and quicktime movies to explain each and every step of an overly complicated process.

Can somebody explain what Silverfast does better than what the Epson does faster and easier?

[Ralph Barker]

The Silverfast plugin provides a bit more control of the scanning process, including contrast curves, color balance, and such. If you find the Epson software easier to use, and sufficient for your purposes, however, I'd say stick with that for your scanning.

[Kirk Gittings]

As the story goes....The Silverfast also allows you to do multiple pass scans which reduce noise in the shadows allowing you to achieve a better D-Max. Most people do 16 pass.

[John C Murphy]

The Silverfast menus are somewhat more intuitive than the Epson menus, but Silverfast actually seems to slow things down a little during the scanning process. One nice thing about the Silverfast is that you can upgrade for about $100 it to make ICC profiles of your scanner.