Flat bed vs dedicated film scanner

[ywenz]

To scan my 35s, I'm currently using an Epson flatbed that has film capabiilty. I'm finding that when trying to bring up the midrange in Photoshop, I'm finding a lot of noise in the shadows and also a lot of dust and hairs in the scan. I'm not sure if the noise in the shadows has more to do with the limitation of the film or is it that my scanner just wasn't able to capture all the tones from the negative.

Also, do most dedicaetd scanners have some sort of "brush" mechanism to clean the negative as it is being scanned? What other advantages would I generally find in a dedicated scanner?

You can see some of my scans at link below. For these low-res web displays, would a dedicated scanner even make a difference?

http://www.pbase.com/booggerg/nyc_trip

thanks

 

[Stephanie Brim]

If you shoot things other than 35mm format, you may want both. Dedicated film scanners that will do medium format tend to be rather expensive. I plan to do the smart thing: I'm getting a dedicated film scanner for my 35mm (which is my primary film size) and a flatbed later on for when I get serious about my medium format work. The Meopta (TLR) gets taken out of the house periodically when I feel like a learning experience, but for the most part the Canon P, the Canonet, or the Voigtlander leave the house. I've even started using the scale-focus Canon Demi since I found out that it works.

If 35mm is your main format and you don't shoot much else, I'd go with a dedicated film scanner. If you shoot medium format, I'd keep your flatbed and get a cheaper, economical film scanner such as the Minolta Scan Dual IV. If you don't have a budget and really would like to have a multiformat scanner, Minolta makes one that can be found on the 'Bay relatively cheap.

My two-and-a-half cents.

Edit: Forgot to mention the most important thing: there will be a noticable difference in quality of scan with a dedicated scanner with 35mm negatives. It's made for scanning film. The scanner's job is to scan negative/positive film. This is what prompted me to forget the CanoScan 8400 idea that I had a while back and go for a used dedicated scanner. 🙂

 

[ywenz]

thanks! I do some medium format shooting and I'll be keeping my Epson for that purpose... However, I'm finding that when adjusting levels on my medium format scans, I can work with a much greater latitude. Thus, I'm contributing that to the fact that the flat-bed might not have enough resolution to capture all the data from the smaller 35mm negative. Does that theory make sense?

 

[Stephanie Brim]

Yeah. They seldom do. Some of the more advanced ones (such as the newer Epson) are much better...you can get excellent results from them. But I'd still have a dedicated scanner for 35mm film. It's much better scans for a rather low amount of money if you shop right. 🙂

 

[jaapv]

My Minolta 5400 has someting called "pixel polish" that more or lessworks. Digital ICE against scratches is pretty effective. Generally, as far as I know, dedicated filmscanners do have a higher quality and offer more features than flatbedscanners. However, if you do use full resolution and all features, especially multipass, the scan tends to get very slow. I usually scan using 5400 dpi and pixel polish, no ICE as the negatives are straight from the developer one negative will take about a minute and generate about a 130 Mb Tiff file. Any grain I want to remove, I'll run through Neat Image. These are scans made like that. I like to keep some grain, even in a blue sky.

 

[Stephanie Brim]

Yeah, scanning can be time consuming and hard drive consuming as well. I'd consider grabbing up an extra hard drive (whether that be internal or external, it doesn't matter) and storing your photos on that. I don't have that ability at the moment, but as soon as I do that's what I'm going to do. I shoot a lot and I'll be scanning a lot...this HDD will fill up rather quickly and space is cheap these days.

 

[Mark Wood]

As much as the scanner certainly making a difference, the associated software can have just as much impact on image quality. It's worth checking this carefully before you give up on a particular scanner. I originally thought that a cheap "Prime Film 1800" film scanner was utterly useless until I tried it with "Silverfast" software and found that the Mac software supplied with it (and the subsequent updates) just didn't work properly. Vuescan (www.hamrick.com) seems to work very well with just about any scanner. Grass in colour pictures (transparency or negative) scanned with the Nikon software that came with my CoolScan IV just comes out as a strange amorphous green blob if you look closely. With Vuescan, all of the detail suddenly appears and there are different, subtle shades of green as there should be. I had originally written this off as a scanner fault!

 

[hoot]

I sold my dedicated film scanner and bought a flatbed with *full* backlight (i.e., the backlight covers the entire glass platen rather than just a small strip in the middle). It's a brilliant machine. The platen is just big enough to place an entire roll of film on it (in strips of 6) and do a digital contact sheet. The scanner's depth of field is high, so if the film is curled, there's no need to flatten it with foil or glass because everything will be sharp anyway. It comes bundled with the Silverfast software, which works very well as long as you turn off all the annoying automatic features (including the sharpening filter, which is redundant at this stage) and go all manual, just like with a camera. 🙂 Since they'll probably never pay me to advertise, I'm not going to engage in any name-dropping, but if those features sound like your thing, you can do some research.

 

[ywenz]

What scanner is this?

 

[Fred]

Maybe I can shed some light (excuse the pun) on this a tad.

The resolution of a scanner will only give you bigger file sizes and potentially extra sharpness (if its any good and most are). It will not always be able to produce detail when it cannot detect it.

In a nut shell, the greater the dynamic range of a scanner to be able to 'see' in dark areas and pick out detail whilst also being able to 'see' the different tones in the highlight areas the better. As a rule of thumb, the greater the number of the quoted DMAX the better your scanner will be able to pick up these subtle changes in colour, this does not equate directly to image sharpness only what the scanner can 'see'

For negatives this number should be over 3.0 (the colours are compressed somwhat), for transparencies the higher the number the better.

The newer higher end Epson flatbed scanners have a DMAX of about 4 which may be ideal for you if you shoot different formats and trannies. The new Minolta 5400 mark 2 is probably the leader in the dedicated 35mm scanners with the Nikon Coolscan V a close second.

 

[djon]

Scanning 35mm with Ice using the current 5400II Minolta and the Nikon V takes about 2.5 minutes per frame at 4000ppi...much faster than the older Minolta. The Nikon 5000 takes around 1/3 that time...very fast with Ice.

The flatbed scanner described above was undoubtedly Epson 4990. Reports from people seriously into them indicate that they're very good with 35mm but not equal to dedicated Nikon and Minolta...less sharp.

If you HAVE to scan every frame, a flatbed's going to be fastest.

If you can edit slides or from proof prints, flatbed remains useful only (seemingly) because of reflective copy potential and workability with MF and LF film.

I have a Nikon V and an Epson 3200. The 3200 is quite nice with 6X9 film, distinctly less sharp than Nikon with 35mm (ie gets fuzzy above 8X10, while Nikon doesn't get fuzzy at 12X18 (my maximum print size). I understand 4990 is more like Nikon than 3200, but not really close to Nikon.

 

[Fred]

For info, I use an Epson 2450 for MF and a Coolscan IV, both are quite old and are starting to turn grey, like me.

I'm thinking of the new Epson flat bed should do me better than what I have now.