contemplating film scanners

[biomed]

If you plan to do printing from a scan, then go with a dedicated film scanner. This is what was recommended to me when I was looking for a scanner. I ended up with a Canon FS4000US scanner and have been using it for around three years. I believe I paid around $400 for it. The price and the reviews were the reasons I have this scanner. I haven't tried any of the newer flatbeds, but I hear good things about them from friends. Hopefully the newer scanners are a lot faster than the Canon.

 

[RayPA]

Anyone know if any KM 5400 II are available anywhere?

B&H went out of stock earlier in the year for a few months and then a few months later were back in stock. I haven't checked lately, but it was interesting that they restocked a few months after the KM announcement (that was this year wasn't it? 🙂 ).


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[DBMILLER]

It may partially depend on how much work you do on your scans in Photoshop. If you tend to spend a lot of time manipulating the scan (e.g., curves, blending modes, masking, spotting, etc.), you might want to just start with the highest quality scan you can get, and downsample for the web, since you'd have to redo that work later for a print (assuming you could even duplicate it!).

On the other hand, there are scanners, and there are scanners. I recently had a 35mm photo published in a book, where the scan had been done on a Nikon Coolscan 4000. A second 35mm scan in the same book, which was done on a drum scanner, looked so much better by comparison that you'd never believe they originated from the same camera/format. I now view the Nikon scanner as a quick and dirty tool to preview whether or not the image is worth further work, and go to a service bureau for those scans that will be printed. In that kind of scenario, you don't need much of a scanner to do previewing.