A good scanner to print from

[Wenge]

Thank you rjstep3 for the comment. It's one of the Durango & Silverton engines in the Durango station preparing to hook up to the passenger cars for a run up to Silverton, Colorado. Mark

 

[rjstep3]

Thank you rjstep3 for the comment. It's one of the Durango & Silverton engines in the Durango station preparing to hook up to the passenger cars for a run up to Silverton, Colorado. Mark

also - how did you get that much detail out of Kodak Gold 200? My attempts are just snow but you have details in the stack, and in the rods as well. How?

rjstep3

 

[Wenge]

To answer your question, I'm not a tech expert and still learning as I go every day, but I think it's in that 35-80mm f/4-5.6 lens on the N50 with autofocus, plus a tripod was used.

That lens also has surprised me on my Nikon D50 (with AF only, not very good for manual focus). It's a cheap plastic kit but it's really no slouch. The film itself was developed at the drugstore, while I used it mainly back then for b&w conversions.

Am going up later to shoot some snow on the mountain for experiments with tri-x and I'll dust off the d50 with that lens and see what happens since now I'm more curious about it.

 

[A Y]

Hi Wenge, thanks for posting your comments on the XE. It looks like a pretty good scanner, especially for its price. How long did it take to scan that negative at its various resolutions?

 

[van_d]

You'll always be able to find someone who thinks it makes a difference, just like you'll find someone who thinks 8MP is so much better than 6MP.

For me, no, I doubt anyone could ever tell the difference between a scan on a 3.8 DMAX scanner or a 4.0.

The only place I've noticed my V700 not be able to get the results I wanted was on a badly underexposed slide film. I can see the detail holding it up to the light, but the V700 just could not see the shadows at the same time as the highlights. Perhaps a drum scanner with better DMAX capability could, I don't know.

I think for well exposed slides, or negatives, it's fine.

I fully expect a Plustek to be good enough for 99.999% of all of our negatives/slides.

Hmm...that makes sense, thanks for your help on the matter. The Pacific Image seems like a real bang for one's buck, as it's cheaper than any of the Plustek models I was looking at and the resolution (DMAX) is even higher than the Plustek, albeit marginally so.

These were the prints from the 500 or the 600? Are they prints from the image you posted in this thread?

That one was a scan from the Epson V500 that was later printed from.

To follow-up earlier in the post, I've been trying out the Pacific Image Primefilm XE over the past few days. Of course it's not close to a drum, but for small/medium prints it does a decent job imo for the price US $279 and I'm happy with the scans & prints. More time is needed with it to see if I can coax out any dust/scratch removal--the scanner's "MagicTouch" enabled doesn't work for me so far as I've tried it.

Hard to know the actual measured resolution w/o a USAF chart, but it sure is a nice improvement over my dated Canoscan 2710.

I also made a couple decent prints with Epson 3880 at A4 (8x10"). And at A3/12x16 it's still not bad imo. (am curious now to try some Tri-x shot with an M lens).

Should also mention my Nex7 +Nikkor 60/2.8 afd macro yields nearly identical detail at 6000 pixels across. Haven't decided yet to keep the scanner because of this since I don't print large.

First image is direct from scanner downsized for web (no pp), 2nd one is a print shot with a GXR in the lightbox. followed by 100% crops of the scan.

I shot this ~12yrs ago with a Nikon N50 +35-80D with cheap Kodak Gold/200. No sharpening applied in Silverfast or post, only downsized for web ...Mark

Epson 3880 ABW-warm setting, VFA (actual print shows better detail)

full crops from original 8000dpi scan/no sharpening (click/enlarge to 100%). 8000 or 10,000dpi yielded similar results.

That's a pretty awesome scan, thanks for posting your results! 😀

 

[Wenge]

Glad to share whatever info I can. Last night I was surprised that a 10,000 dpi b&w scan in Silverfast 16>8bit mode took only about 2 minutes from pressing the button until the 'finished' message showed, and in the "48bit HDR" mode it took ~3 minutes to render a 755mb file.

The other day when I did these @8000dpi, it was taking >6 minutes (in Silverfast) so I'm thinking maybe disabling the dust/noise options (not needed) last night did this but not sure yet. I need more time playing with it to see the different times & figure out what the settings do. All I can say right now is I got good large usable tiff files in 2 minutes. -Mark

 

[A Y]

Thanks Wenge. I appreciate the timing information.

 

[Wenge]

some more followup/usage notes on the Primefilm XE:

- bottom line first: am keeping the unit, it has very good resolution, the more I use it the more I like the results, especially w/Vuescan for dust removal on color slides/negs.

- the dust/scratch removal turned out not to work so good with either Silverfast or the PIE Cyberview. I almost returned the scanner since I have a lot of old slides/negs to get through now.

- tried Vuescan a couple days ago on a dusty slide, enabled the IR cleaning option, and it worked terrific...almost entirely cleaned of dust without loss of detail, and no bogus artifacts or smearing. It's not perfect and doesn't get 100% of it, but only requires a few quick touch-ups after.

- Below is 8500-dpi Vuescan slide (shot by my late father in 2003 of one of his homes he built) first with a crop without cleaning or color correction, the second full scan with IR cleaning & exposure comp. No sharpening applied in-scan or post, only downsizing w/bicubic. Did not touch-up the cleaned version at all. (slide is Kodak Elite-chrome 100).

- A slight touch of usm would improve the detail contrast a good bit but didn't apply it here.

more notes:
- turn on scanner & let it warm up until blue light is solid, then open Vuescan. Had problems if scanner left on, then did other work on computer, then came back and scanned more. Best to close Vuescan and turn off unit when finished scanning rather than allowing scanner to sleep and try to use again later. Problems include rendering portrait orientation instead of landscape into a distorted file of only 1/2 the pixels on the long side (a bug in either the driver or the s/w).

- Tri-x scans made at 3650 & 5500dpi give identical detail & tones as when scanned at 10,000dpi and then downsized to those levels. no reason (for me) to scan higher than 5500dpi which gives a good A2 print.

- use 'media=image'; 16-bit gray to scan tri-x as positive, invert in post, better detail/tones than scanning as negative

- Vuescan time: 8500dpi, 48-bit rgb: no ir clean=5 minutes (with ir clean=6 min). 3650dpi, 16-bit grayscale: 2 minutes

- when using Vuescan the Cyberview drivers for the scanner must be installed first. The most recent Cyberview version as of 4/26/14 (v5.16.15) here on the scanace site which works on my system with Vuescan v9.4.28:
http://www.scanace.com/sd.php
use the "Primefilm 7200" option and "CVX5" software on the dropdowns as they don't have the XE posted yet, it works on my Win8/64 system (same software is used w/7200 & XE)