I want to get better at 8x10 scanning, send me your tips!

[Ultrachrome]

Tip 1. Call Micheal Streeter and order an IQSmart scanner.

That's the only tip. An IQSmart2 even will blow away an Epson, keep up with most drum scans, and make your life crazy easy. We are using an Eversmart Supreme II at the lab and it's just bonkers easy to scan sheet film to extreme levels of quality. We're scanning all negative film as a positive and converting with Negative Lab Pro.

I concur. We have a couple of V750s, a Phase One Cultural Heritage system and a Creo iQsmart 3. The Epsons just gets used as document scanners now but they also do well enough for photographs. The quality difference between the Phase One and the Creo with B&W negatives are almost a wash but I'd put the slight advantage to the Phase One. The Creo is definitely the winner though with color film material - especially color negatives - Albeit pretty slow if you're trying to get through a lot of material. This said, you should still be able to get Okay film scans out of your Epson with proper settings and fluid mounting. As I understand it you might need to shim your carriers to get properly focus.

I'm really surprised though that you're using Negative Lab Pro for inversions. I find the Creo's inversions really good and how the color negative was intended to look While Negative Lab Pro is about the best option out there for DSLR digitizing, for us, It really mucks up the workflow and requires more work to make the images look good. I do think though I need to spend more time with that software as my observations about it could be user error as much as anything. I know there has been recent improvements.

[SergeyT]

>> Creo's inversions really good
It employs an adaptive algorithm that depends on content of the scanned image (possibly including fragments of scanning mask at the edges). It does all the analysis and calculation of inversion values on a tiny prescan image and therefore very susceptible to conversion errors due to dust, film imperfections , mask fragments, etc. and rounding.
It may do a good job on a 'perfect' preview with no dust, imperfections and mask elements, but such conditions rarely occur in real life.