Since I decided to move to a drum scanner, my first step was to obtain scans of negatives that I have scanned with my Epson V850. These two images are one example. The Howtek scan was down at 4000dpi while the Epson was at 6300dpi. Focus was set on the Epson best I could at the time the scan was made. It was wet scanned while the Howtek was a dry scan (currently getting a wet scan of another neg for comparison of wet vs wet)

Right off the bat, you can see the differences in the scans. From my perspective, the Howtek wins hands down. The Epson is no slouch by any means and does a fantastic job especially for a cost of 1/8 that of the Howtek and I would say that if you were to display your work side by side of both scanners of the same images, no very few would be able to see the differences. But having spent quite a bit of time scanning and photographing and knowing my images, the differences (all positive) are unmistakable.

I performed the identical conversion from neg to positive, ie, all settings were identical. I did no post processing at all on either image, no curves adj, sharpening etc. Both were 100% quality jpgs using Bicubic only and both are identical in size (3686 x 4688 pixels)



Howtek 8000 Left Epson V850 Right

Conclusion, the Howtek 8000 will be well worth the investment, especially as I start to do astrophotography and science with large format film