Batch scanning negatives on V700, single pass possible?

[godfrog]

I have a collection of about 1500 photos shot on negative film that I would like to scan. The goal is speed and I do not need very high detail or ICE, Id rescan if I decided to print one big. Im thinking 1200 DPI. I have a Epson V700 scanner.

So my question is, is there any way I can scan the negative holders in one pass, maintaining full automation for crop and color/levels adjust?

If I select the area occupied by 16 negatives the scan finishes in about a minute. If I let the scanner software work in full auto, the scan takes 10 minutes, as the scanner sends the scanner head all over the place, and negatives placed next to each other in the holders are scanned one at a time. Horribly inefficient.

Is there any software that can do single pass with full automation? Or is there some option in the V700 software Im missing?

 

[bigeye]

I'd be interested too.

I bought a V300 to test my interest in scanning and it is better suited for this use - faster and certainly with adequate quality. (I bought the V700 for 120 and 4x5 scanning.)

 

[EliasK]

You can't avoid preview scan no matter what software you will use. (this is the first pass you are talking about, I suppose, takes less than 1 min).
The speed of second pass, which is the normal scan, depends on the resolution. The higher it is, the slower is the scan speed. At 1200dpi needs about 14 min for 24 frames. (if i remember well)

The fastest option is to make a "contact print" scan using the film area guide. Time for the contact print also has to do with the selected resolution, but it is much faster.


Epson scan software, the "film area guide" and professional mode:

-Use the film area guide (see user's guide/index/Placing Film in the Film Area Guide)
-arrange your negatives on the scanner glass
-start epson scan, professional mode, -select:
document type: Film (with Film Area Guide)
film type: as required
image type: as required
resolution: 300 -is enough for a normal "contact print" try bigger if you wish
-click preview
-click and select the negatives area on the preview window
-scan

 

[godfrog]

Thank you for your reply.

However, I am not talking about the preview scan, but rather the final scan yielding the output. The problem Im having is that the scanner moves the scanning head to the starting position, moves to the image, scans it, then returns the head. Two images next to each other are scanned separately, generally sending the scan head all over the place consuming a lot of time.

Scanning the area occupied by 16 negatives (4 strips, 4 per strip) at 1200DPI takes about a minute. Having the scanner scan each negative separately takes about 10 minutes. Except for the crop and individual color adjust, the two scans result in the same image data.

Smart software could do a preview scan, find the crop areas, select hardware exposure based on the combined image data in the crop areas, do one 1200DPI pass of all the images, crop out the images and adjust color individually. The Epson software already is capable to do all the difficult parts (finding crop areas, adjust colors), they just need to exploit their algorithms better 🙂