FYI vuescan and canon 9950F

[Ed Richards]

I misunderstood - I though you just wanted to scan MF. For MF, there are great options. For 4x5, they are not so great. A Creo would probably be best bet for ease of use, but they are very expensive.

[Kirk Gittings]

Lets not kid ourselves. Frankly these consumer level scanners are amazing pieces of equipment at the price, but not really up to the equivilent standards of someone with a largeformat analogue history. The irony is that we are all addicted to fine detail or we wouldn't shoot large format..... yet we are trying to get by with consumer level scanners that won't give you a resonably sharp 16x20 from a 4x5 without oversharpening the file. Did I ever have problems getting a sharp 16x20 print in an enlargement?

I have owned (counting returns) a EP 3200, two EP 4870, two EP4990's, 4 CN 9950F's and now two MT 1800F's (I also have access to an Imacon 848 and a 949). The consumer flatbeds all can give a decent 11x14 with careful attention to workflow. The 1800F barely gives me an adequate 16x20 but at that size the other's fall way short.

What we need is a dedicated film scanner that will handle 4x5, but given the shrinking film market conditions I don't see this happening.

[robc]

Kirk,

You left out "That is cheap".

You know you can have what you want if you are prepared to pay for it. Its called a drum scanner. If not, and you want quality, then stay analogue.

[Ed Richards]

> You know you can have what you want if you are prepared to pay for it. Its called a drum scanner.

While money is an issue, it is also time - a drum scanner will be a fairly old, used piece of equipment, that will require computer and mechanical tinkering. Combined with the mounting station, it takes a lot of room. If you use oil based mounting fluid it is a mess to clean up your negatives after scanning, if you use naptha based fluid, unless you have a vent hood you are blowing a flammable hydrocarbon into the air. You can pretty much count on spending a significant amount of time to get the scans. If this is not your day job, and that includes folks who are full time photographers, but who make their living doing commercial work, that cuts into shooting time. Of course, so does typing on the forum, but I do that when I am breaking from my real work, not when I have time to shoot.:-)

[robc]

Ed,

The ICG drums are floor vertical standing so they don't take up much room and for a 4x5 neg, if my understanding is correct, wet mounting is not really necessary unless you want really big prints. i.e. they dont have to be very time consuming.

Out of interest I just enquired about cost of a factory refurbished ICG drum scanner and it was GBP 6000 for a 4000 dpi scanner. Next up was GBP 11000 for a 12000 dpi scanner.

I reckon with a bit of bargaining you could get 10% to 20% off those prices so they are not unattainable but not cost justifiable as far as I'm concerned.

[robc]

back on topic:

update on canon 9950f and vuescan:

"depends on whether you're scanning reflective or transparent
material, whether you scan at the optical resolution of the scanner or
a bit less than this, and whether you have really dark slides or not."

now I think Kirk was scanning without vuescan, but I could be wrong. And if he wasn't using vuescan then the problem is with the Canon hardware or the canon scan gear software.

perhaps Ed could do a little experimentation to see what happens and fill us in on the results.

[Kirk Gittings]

"now I think Kirk was scanning without vuescan, but I could be wrong. And if he wasn't using vuescan then the problem is with the Canon hardware or the canon scan gear software."

I was not using Vuescan. I was using the Canon software and Silverfast. I was not doing any multisampling at all. I was using it for straight forward volume scans of 6x9 color negatives for my business.

[robc]

that would seem to confirm that the problem, for those that have experienced it, is with the canon or the canon software since the review at photo-i was using vuescan.

pity because as a cheap but useable option the canon seemed to have the edge over the epson as far I was concerned.

[Ed Richards]

> perhaps Ed could do a little experimentation to see what happens and fill us in on the results.

My experience with the Canon 9950f:

The canon software is terrible for LF, you have to use Silverfast or Vuescan.

Vuescan for the Canon got a lot better about 4 months ago. If you tried it earlier, try again.

My workflow is to scan for max info and do tuning in PS or PWP. I scan at 4800 and downsample to 2400. Vuescan will do this, but Silverfast does not. I use the green channel. I scan emulsion down - makes a difference - with a single sheet thickness of Manila folder paper as a shim to prevent Newton's rings if the film pops down. It is within the scanner DOF, at least as far as my tests show.

I do not get mottled skies. I do not seem to get much noise.

There is detail I can see at 20x in the negatives that I cannot see on the scans. There is nothing at 4x that is not in the scans, and I do not have a 10x magnifier.

I use a modified zone system and keep negative density mostly under control, so Dmax is not an issue. That may also affect the noise issue, or I may not be picky enough.:-)

Sharpening is the huge issue in this. Flatbed scans need sharpened, and sharpening can make everything worse. I use a small amount of sharpening on some images, and none on others. At print time, I use Quimage to process the images. It feeds the printer with the optimal rez and it does print time sharpening based on the image size and print size. It works for me, and the counter examples which have been posted involving digicam files do not convince me that what I am seeing on the paper is wrong. I think the Qimage algorithm is better than I can do tinkering in PS while looking at a monitor. If I were making bigger prints, I would do more selective sharpening and would blur the skies. YMMV.

I will be very interested to see how the scans from the 1800 compare. I would get a drum scan, but then I might be spoiled. There are lots of things that cost $100 a pop that I like that I cannot justify. At least drum scans do not make you fat.