Home Testing Flatbed Scanners

[Henry Ambrose]

Ralph, my 4990 works well with the film emulsion down on the glass. There is a choice in the software for filmholder or not. If I remember correctly its available when you are using the 8x10 film area guide.

[Ed Richards]

> If you don't need Ice look also at the later production Canon 9950.

If you use Vuescan, Ice works OK on the 9950. (Current version, not old versions.) That said, I do not much like Ice on any scanner and prefer to use PS to fix problems. But nobody is paying me by the hour.

> For 8x10 you really ought to look at the Microtek 1800f.

Absolutely, esp. if you shoot Tmax 100 - the emulsion side and reverse are both so smooth you get Newton's rings and you do not want to scan through anti-Newton's ring glass.

[Kirk Gittings]

Ed,
The Canon does not have Digital Ice so Vuescan cannot drive it. Canon has something similar called FARE but it is not the same and by all accounts not nearly as good. DI is a Kodak patented product and superior in all my testing and everything I have seen written. It is never perfect but it saves us a ton of time. It works slightly better in some setups than others. For instance on the Epson's it works better with Silverfast than Epsonscan, but it takes allot longer. I assume some superior number crunching is taking place. On the Nikon it works better with the Nikon software and is almost instantaneous.

Ralph,

It may work adequately for him that way, but it is not optimum. The plane of focus on the Epsons is about 1/16 above the glass and is fixed. And it does make a small difference. Try it with a 4x5 on the glass and in the holder. That is why the wet mounting people went over to putting an acrilic sheet down below the negative on these scanners to get the negative up to the plane of focus.

[Ed Richards]

> Canon has something similar called FARE but it is not the same and by all accounts not nearly as good.

I am not sure whose accounts, but since it is software controlled, it depends on the software. The Vuescan support has been improved quite a bit in the last month, so I would not depend on old reports. They are both the same process - you generate an infared scan and subtract it from the visible light scan, with different ways of handing it in the software. I do not much care because it does not work on black and white silver negatives. Since you do 120, it seems like the Nikon would be much better than anything else but a drum scan. Certainly better than the flatbeds.

[Kirk Gittings]

Ed,

Unfortunately nothing is simple and the Nikon is a great example. The Nikons do a great scan but.....Triple CCD sensor dedicated film scanners (which all the Nikons are and a few others) have a conflict with Digital Ice which produces banding. So you have to slow the scan down by using only one sensor (the super fine setting) to get DI to work without banding. So one of the benefits of this scanner, speed, takes a big hit. For a 40 MB file it goes from 4 minutes to ten minutes. The 4990 takes 20 minutes for the same scan but...... The Nikon is also slower to load and cannot do a 4up batch scan like the Epson's. With the Epson and Silverfast we batch burn four scans which takes 120 minutes but we have SF write the file to another networked computer. We work on each file as soon as it is written. It is a good workflow. All in all we get a better scan from the Nikon but we have a better and quicker workflow with the Epson.

Also DI is not just software, there is a patented hardware component to. I have no idea what that is. It was originally deveoped by Applied Science Fiction. Kodak got ahold of it when it bought ASF and turned it into their in house digital research branch. That was probably the end of their creativity.

[Paul Kierstead]

AFAIK, it is basically an infrared channel. The defects and dust distrub/block the infrared and the film is pretty much entirely transparent to it. B&W film and Kodacrhrome film block infrared, so these do not work with ICE. I am sure there are lots of details to work out, but those are the basics of it to my understanding.

Note there are a considerable amount of 'software only' solutions, but these usually soften the shot horribly.

[Henry Ambrose]

Ralph and Kirk,
I tested my 4990 and I get better scans with film flat on the glass - very sharp and completely satisfactory for an inexpensive scanner. This 4990 is a visible improvement over the other two Epsons I've owned in the last few years. I am fully capable of judging the quality of a scanner's output - I've been scanning since 1992 and I've seen and worked with tens of thousands of files from many different scanners of all types and scanning cameras.

I -know- the machines we are discussing (cheap flatbeds) are somewhat variable and each needs to be tested to see what it does. My last Epson was sharpest -between- the holder and glass, which needed testing to show. If the plane of focus was exactly 1/16" above the glass on all Epsons then they'd all be the same and need the same film mounting procedure, wouldn't they? Isn't this what this thread is about - testing your individual scanner to see what it does?

Now as for Digital Ice and other such - don't use it! Clean your film and spot it manually if you want all the info that's in your film. GIGO. There ain't no magic buttons.

[Ralph Barker]

Thanks, guys.

[neil poulsen]

Henry Ambrose wrote:

"Ralph, my 4990 works well with the film emulsion down on the glass. There is a choice in the software for filmholder or not. If I remember correctly its available when you are using the 8x10 film area guide."

I wonder if the 4990 does something to change the plane of focus in the scanner hardware, if there's a choice not to use the film holders in the software?

[Kirk Gittings]

"Now as for Digital Ice and other such - don't use it! Clean your film and spot it manually if you want all the info that's in your film. GIGO. There ain't no magic buttons.:

Henry, I appreciate the sentiment. I don't use ICE on my personal work, but with 50 images a week to scan for our commercial business, it is a necessity.