Any experience with the G4050?

[KevinVH]

Hi guys


Short intro. I'm a 22 year old photographer who recently moved from Belgium to south america. I used to scan my negatives with the G4050 which i was able to come by for 60 bucks at the time. I sold it before i moved and planned on buying a plustek or epson on amazon to use here. I dont print anything, so mostly for web purposes.
Turns out the president here puts 40% taxes on any import over 400 dollar, and its not easy at all to buy stuff of the internet.

I came by the same HP G4050 for a reasonable price, so for the time being, thats my only option. What are some recommendations you guys have on making it a better scanner. I didnt experiment a lot with the settings in Belgium because I didnt shoot that much film, but now half of my work is film so please, enlighten me.

I've looked into the betterscan glas, but like I mentioned before, buying stuff of the internet is almost impossible.

 

[cabbiinc]

I've got one and don't care for it. It's not the hardware, which is OK for web posting or most non-critical things. It's the software that's downright frustrating. You can't save any presets and you have to basically start over every time you do a prescan. If the software doesn't detect the individual frames you have to manually add them, and that gets time consuming. If it detects the frames incorrectly you then have to adjust each and every one by hand, every time, even when they're all in the same place time after time.

As for the holders I preferred to just lay the negatives on the glass. It seemed to be far sharper than anything that was held in the holders which were somewhat useless anyways as they never lined up twice in the same spot. If you lay the negative on the glass sideways from the way the holders hold them you can scan a single frame faster anyways since it's scanning the short way. I suspect the reason why they didn't make it that way to begin with was that you'd see more of the distortion on the edges of the scan, which is another drawback of the scanner. The 35mm scans from the edges of the scanner are a different dimension than the same film in the center.

I'd look for a dedicated 35mm scanner or an Epson used before buying this thing again, however I do still own it so it's not unusable.

 

[cabbiinc]

Although I will say it's a decent scanner with Vuescan. If you're the type of person that wants to use a flatbed scanner as a proofing device and will just send out any masterpiece scans for professional scanning then this does work for that.

 

[KevinVH]

It's just that I don't have any other options for the time being. I've been here for almost 2 months now, working on getting an epson V600 or Plustek since I got here, and I still haven't got any good option on buying one of those. The HP I can go buy in the store tomorrow. This really is a dilemma, since I'm a little bit short on money, so spending 250 dollars on a scanner I'll only use for a while( without good results), without the prospect of being able to sell it again is kind of agony.

 

[Wouter]

I almost threw it away when I was using the original software, but with vuescan it improves a lot. With patience you can get decent scans, and it's multiformat, that's an advantage.

 

[KevinVH]

I'm going to see tomorrow how much it is, and then decide. I'll probably buy it, and use it until I can come buy an epson or plustek. Any advice on the settings in vuescan?

 

[KevinVH]

ok little update, while going to buy the G4050 the guy told me they have a Epson V500 so I decided to go for that one. Going to pick it up tomorrow and see if it's any good.

thanks for the help