Adventures with the new HP G4050 - A newbie's review

[Padu Merloti]

Continuing with my saga of pointless tests on cheap scanners, I bought a canoscan 8600F. My first surprise: the slit on the top of the scanner isn't wide enough to cover a full 4x5 tranny. Big show stopper.

Since I had it in my hands, I decided to go ahead and use my test tranny and see how it compares with the scitex, the dslr and the hg g4050.

Well, it at least had drivers for vista. If you have 35mm negatives, slides or 120 film, this scanner may be a very good option (paid $180 at best buy). It does a very good job at identifying individual frames and the speed is not so bad. Comparing the 8600F and the G4050 is like comparing a bicycle and a gsxr1000.

I scanned the tranny in two parts and merged it later in adobe elements. I didn't have photoshop in my laptop, so I had to struggle a bit with elements. The driver software is a bit cumbersome, especially when you're trying to scan something directly from the glass.

Anyways, here's a comparison again:

hp g4050


canon canoscan 8600F @1200 dpi, 100% crop

[Padu Merloti]

To the few still lurking this thread...

I finally gave up testing cheap scanners. Just bought an epson v700, it should arrive in the mail in the next days. I'll post my final comparisons when it arrives.

[Stefan Lungu]

Thanks for the comparison. I have a Canon 8600F that I got for my 6x7 film scans and found out that it can not scan 4x5 but I have not yet decided if I will get something else. Normally the scanner has holders that keep the film above the glass, so I don't know how it behaves in terms of sharpness when set up to scan film that is placed directly on glass. Keep us posted with your impressions.

Regards, Stefan

[Padu Merloti]

The scan above of the 8600F is of a 4x5 transparency scanned at the glass. I laid another sheet of glass on top of the tranny to make it flat. The real bummer is that you need to do 2 scans and then stitch them together in photoshop if you want to scan 4x5s.