Scans from M7, Epson V700

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mtwo

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I have just scaned a couple of rolls of Velvia 100 from my, new to me M7, on my also new Epson V700. (Vista forced me to get a new scanner so the Minolta Scan Dual is going to be excess.) Anyway, generaly I am not dissatisfied with the results but I find the scanner a chore to use. It needs, or at least it seems to need to be told exactly what to do with every template load of slides. The ability to do a dozen at a time is neat, however. I was not displeased with the colors but I did do some image manipulation in PSCS. Some of the results are here:
http://www.pbase.com/dahlstetphoto/m7scans if you would care to have a look. If any of you have any tips on getting the best out of this scanner I am more than willing to listen.

The M7 is a bucket of fun to use, btw, but I really do need a 21mm finder for my favorite wa lens. I have been surprised by the 28mm Voigtlander especially with Velvia. It was something of a dog on the M8 I sold. TIA, John
 
I have had a V700 on loan to me for several months now and I am dissatisfied with the difficulty and quality of the scans I'm getting from it. The neg carriers are annoying I have dust everywhere, the focus is hit or miss and I often lose out on a lot of the highlight/shadow detail. I've since resolved to get a Coolscan 5000. The way I see it darkroom printing is an art but scanning shouldnt be.
 
Scans

Scans

I have not had the scanner for very long. Mostly I use it for old, really old, family photos where it does very well. I am not unhappy with the dust showing up on transparencies but negatives are an order of magnitude more difficult. I scanned negs on my Minolta but hated doing it since I knew I would be spending lots of time with the clone tool. I had very little trouble with the slides I scanned on the V700. They came fresh out of the plastic sleeves though. I am curious about the color of what I am scanning. What came out did not look like Velvia and so I messed with it a bit in PS but it is still not there.

What I would like to find out is what others are doing with slides and what their scanner settings are. I realize that using a flat bed scanner is never going to equal the results of a professional scan but then I am not selling this stuff either. So...
John
 
I kinda like the results of the scans done with my V700. BW, color print film and color slide film comes out very nicely. I just once used the holder for mounted slides (to scan the first roll of KR64) and even scanned Kodakchrome was OK.

For 135 film in the film stripe holder, anti newton reflective glass plates are a must when the film is only slightly curly. The Epson film holder doesn't do a good job holding film flat (135) ... Important is also to make some test with the hight settings of the film holder, my one works OK with the factory setting but it is highly recommended to test it. If not using the film holder but film area guide (having the film directly on the glass plate of the scanner), the lens has to be switched via the software (Epson software) since the focus point of the high resolution lens is a few mm above the glass plate to compensate for the height of the film holder.

I do all my scans at either 3200 or 4800 dpi with manual setting of the exposure and USM set to medium. I never use ICE because I found it "softens" fine details to much. Because I also have always dust on my film, I use PS (healing tool) to remove dust specks.

Cheers,

Gabor
 
Hello John,

did you get good scans with your Minolta scanner ? If yes, I would suggest to get rid of Vista and scale back to XP. Despite the hilarious Apple campaign on TV ... this much money on advertising and this much for fixing Vista - I never heard anything but problems from users 😉. If a new software gives you trouble using your existing hardware that worked fine before it's no question to me that this is not the fault of the hardware.
 
Believe me, I have thought long and hard about ditching Vista. It is still an option for me since this computer was built locally and is still under warranty. However, I am not the only user of the beast. Furthermore, the Minolta is no real gem. I could get about a 5mp scan which was OK but you are limited on the numbers of slides or negs you can scan at a time so the process was even slower. It still works but the feed mechanism is often in need of a helping hand and there are no drivers for this old guy. I did find some on line and assume you still can. So, for now, I am going to stick with Vista even though I curse it on a daily basis. All told the V700 is a better scanner. John
 
When I bought my laptop, it came with a free upgrade to Vista as soon as it became available. When it did, it ordered it and installed it. One month later I reinstalled XP. With all of its warts, XP is still far better than Vista. I suppose if you use all of the features Vista offers, it is worthwhile. But for me who uses a computer primarily as a photographs workflow tool, doing e-mail and surfing the net for news, shopping and reading interesting articles, XP is faster and easier to use and occupies less disc space. As far as I am concerned, Vista is a turkey. If your use of the computer is as limited in scope as mine, I suggest that you install XP and then try re-scanning.

My next computer will be a MAC.
 
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the V700 requires some perseverance to get a good workflow for each of C41, E6 and B+W but it truly delivers once you've spent a bit (or a lot) of time playing with it.

software is important too. i find silverfast best for C41 and vuescan best for B+W and E6. i'm still struggling to get good colour from C41 scanning through vuescan, but i haven't given up yet.

all my stuff is scanned with a V700. i don't scan at very high res for uploading to my flickr page but do when scanning for print and love the detail this machine can pull out.
 
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Vista is not bad - Depends who built the PC

Vista is not bad - Depends who built the PC

I don't want to steer this thread away from the main topic but - I've been running Vista Home Premium on a new PC acquired in August '08 and have not had one problem with my machine. I believe a lot has to do with how the machine is built and who is doing the building.

I was tired of ordering PC's from Dell and HP that came loaded with crapware and bloatware - becoming bogged down in terms of performance in a matter of months. My research brought me this little boutique PC maker (known for building gaming machines) in NJ.

I ordered their entry-level DASH PC (AMD 9650 Quad-Core 2.30GHz processor/3GB Ram) and have never been happier with my computing experience. My machine is clean, fast, and nimble and no crashes!

I have nothing to do with these folks other than being a 1st time customer. Their customer service is excellent as well - your tech support person is *the* person who built your machine.

Just offering an alternative to the usual stuff that's out there.

- Ray
 
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