Will Silverfast downsample?

[Ed Richards]

I mostly use Vuescan, but have been trying Silverfast. One question I cannot sort out from the documentation in Silverfast is whether it will downsample, i.e., scan at 4800 dpi and internally downsample to 2400. Vuescan does this and it produces a better file than scanning at 2400. Silverfast lets you scale the output, but when use use Ctrl command to show optical resolution, you find that it is not scanning and downsampling, but just reducing the optical resolution. Is there an option I am missing to do real downsampling?

[Brian Ellis]

I scan at 2400 or 4800 ppi and downsample in Photoshop. I'm not aware of an option to downsample in Silverfast Ai though that's not so say there isn't one, just that if there is I haven't run across it. Is there an advantage to downsampling in the scanner software as opposed to Photoshop?

[Ed Richards]

> Is there an advantage to downsampling in the scanner software as opposed to Photoshop?

1) Patience - a 16 bit/4800 dpi file for 4x5 is about 700 megs. On my old 2 gig computer with 1 gig of ram, it takes a long time to load, downsample, and save a 700 meg file.

2) If the file is much bigger than 1 gig, as with a 48 bit color file, you bump into photoshop memory limits under Windows, so it is handy to have the scanner crunch the file first.

[Brian Ellis]

Thanks. Yes, it definitely takes a lot of time but I work on a very low volume so that isn't a major problem. Still, I wouldn't mind speeding things up so hopefully someone will tell us that Silverfast does indeed have that feature.

[paulr]

I apprecieate vuescan's downsampling purely for the time saving. I have an old slow mac (1999ish) so scanning for me involves a lot of getting up and leaving to do something else. It's nice to have the scan software take care of that extra step for me. but functionally it's identical to what photoshop can do.