flatbed scanners for film

FrankS

FrankS

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I'm going to buy a flatbed scanner tomorrow.


The Epson 4490 can handle MF film, 4800dpi for $269Cdn with rebate

http://www.vistek.ca/details/details.aspx?t=specs&WebCode=221622&CategoryID=Scanners



I've come across a Canon flatbed which can also handle MF film. Does anyone have any experience with the Canon 8400F? 3200dpi, $229Cdn

http://www.vistek.ca/details/details.aspx?WebCode=217423&CategoryID=Scanners



Obviously for the web (and RFF gallery) the 4800dpi capability of the 4490 is not required. When printing, does one use max dpi for best results? Logic would say so, but I'm a newbee at this digital stuff.

Which would you buy, and why?
Thanks
 
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Yellow color in font unreadable on my monitor

Yellow color in font unreadable on my monitor

Sorry Frank, my old vision doesn't allow me to read the yellow print. This has happened to me with other posters who likewise print in yellow. Could you change it to some other color, please ??
 
Comes down to this:

$40 more, dealing with a mail-in rebate, and driving about 150miles into and out of downtown Toronto to get the Epson with 4800dpi

versus the Canon with 3200dpi which is available with a 60mile drive at a Future Shop store which offers a 30 or 60 day price guarantee

Will the dpi difference show up in small prints? large prints? Depends on the printer I guess, but the Epson will deliver a larger file size, right?
 
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Are you going to walk into a shop and see the scanners, or just buy online. If you have the chance to see the scanners, I'd take a strip of 35mm film and a strip of 120, and try loading the holders. My major quibble with my Epson 4990 is the film holders.

I find 120 film can bow a bit in the holder, and end up touching the glass bed, resulting in newton rings. I bought Doug Fisher's 3rd party MF film holder to get around this, which works fine, but if you can get a scanner with decent holders in the first place, you wouldn't have to do this.

For 35mm I often have the same problem, particularly with the frames at the middle of a strip of 6. For this reason, I tend to scan 35mm on a cheap second-hand Minolta film scanner.

I've no idea if the Canon (or any other make) is any better in this respect.
 
If you can confirm the film holders are the same as the 9950F then you won't be disappointed, I spent about an hour in the shop playing/scanning with the 9950F a few months back when I was looking for a scanner - the holders are very nice.

Never tried the 8400F though.
 
FrankS said:
Comes down to this:

$40 more, dealing with a mail-in rebate, and driving about 150miles into and out of downtown Toronto to get the Epson with 4800dpi

versus the Canon with 3200dpi which is available with a 60mile drive at a Future Shop store which offers a 30 or 60 day price guarantee

Will the dpi difference show up in small prints? large prints? Depends on the printer I guess, but the Epson will deliver a larger file size, right?
Click to expand...

I personnally own an Epson 4870 and I've read on the net that the real optical resolution is 3200 DPI even if they claim 4800 (I guess it is the same for the model you have in mind).

I did some testing with no better results (except a bigger file to process).

I usually scan 24*36 and MF at 3200 dpi (with no noise reduction, sharpening and so on) 16 bit because I often crop it and adjust toning. If you take care of a clean scanning space before each scan process (wearing dedicated gloves, cleaning the glasses,...), dust removal is often not necessary.

I also heard that 3200 DPI is more than enough to capture film grain. Obtained scans from a flatbed are softer than the one produced by a dedicated one, but for MF it is more than enough (and for my purpose, it is just enough too for 24*36).

After image manipulation (usually quite mild) I store it as a jpeg (8 bit) as the reference.

I only resize and sharpen it for print purpose, depending the final print size.
 
Only issue with the 4490 is that the 120 film holder is roughtly 6x12; so you can't scan a whole strip in one go. I bought one originaly and the quality was nore than adequate, however I almost immediately felt the need to uograde to be able to scan more at the same time...And I upgraded to the 4990. The Canon looks good too..

The best quality/size ratio you can get when scanning is to scan at the maximum optical resolution of your scanner, but not necessarily in 16 bits. A 4800dpi scan in 8 bits will make a 10MB file on disk as a 100% quality JPEG, however it will make an /enormous/ 16 bits TIFF even at a much lower resolution.

+ Scan at 4800dpi JPEG 8 bits
+ Do the color/level correction in PS correction layers
+ Convert to 16 bits in PS
+ Flatten the layers
+ Reduce the size to 3200 or 2400dpi
+ Sharpen
+ Remove the odd dust
+ Convert back to 8 bits
+ Save as JPEG again

By oversampling on the resolution, you get better quality than doing an equivalent 16 bits scan because the downsampling will dramaticaly lower the scanner noise as well as the grain. When you do the "Image Size" downsampling /every/ 4800dpi pixel will "participate" in the resulting image, not just one on two like the scanner would do for a 2400dpi scan for example.

Hear my word, I'm a Digital Signal Processing engineer, I'm not talking out of my ass like most people who talk about scanners :/
 
If you're going to be scanning things as TIFF at 4800DPI I would suggest the purchase of a very large HDD as per Buze's comments. If you're going to scan color, you may want to go as far as getting a couple. :p
 
Check out these reviews of the Epson and Canon scanners

http://www.photo-i.co.uk/index.html

I use the Epson 4990 and I am happy with the results - takes a bit of practice with any scanner to get consistent results. I use Silverfast AI which produces comparable scans much more quickly than the Epson software, but the Epson software produces acceptable results. Siverfast SE which comes bundled with the 4990, is fine, but does not do batch scanning. I only scan stuff I'm happy with and for 35mm I set the the final print size to 15 x 10 inches at 300 dpi and let the scanner software work out the scanning resolution (actually around 3000 dpi). I do scan at 16 bit, even though the raw scan quality is not very much different to 8 bit. However, just gives me more bits to play with in PS. I save the raw scans as 16 bit Tiffs and processed scans separately as 16 bit Tiffs. I then use the processed Tiffs to produce resized jpegs for web etc. Long winded and memory hungry, but it works for me YMMV.

Good luck with your choice.
 
If you are using a mac you probably want to go with the epson. Because Canon does not have very good drivers for mac computers.
 
Thank you all for your help. I'm like a babe in the woods when it comes to this digital stuff.

Buze, your workflow list is much appreciated. I don't know what it all means yet but I might soon.
 
i think resolution is not the only factor important in a scanner. But i can't comment on these, did not have any of the two. But i'm a bit in the same shoe. I was. Because i just ordered a scanner.
 
Wayne Fulton has a great site at www.scantips.com. It has great tutorials for people new to scanning. I seriously encourage you to work through the tutorials. As far a scanners go, I would go for 4490 over the 8400 primarily because the EpsonScan software is better than CanoScan. Canon makes nice hardware, especially the 9950, but the software holds the scanners back. You can Google for threads on the CanoScan software. Some people feel ICE is superior to Canon's FARE, but that might be splitting hairs. Both are very decent MF scanners considering their price point.

Doug
---
www.betterscanning.com
 
I have a friend who uses a Canon flatbed (not sure if it's the same model, but it's a very recent one that does 35mm and MF) and I use a 4490. We both agree that mine does slightly better. On some pictures there's no real difference, and on others there is a small difference in favor of the 4490. It seems to do noticeable better (meaning: better at scanning the grain structures) with b&w film at high ISO's, although I'm not sure why. For a flatbed, the Epson 4490/4990 quality is as close to that of a dedicated film scanner as it gets, I think.
 
i went for the epson v700, Frank.
Decided that it would be the last major investment in this year, for me. Hesitated between the scanner and the new sony dslr that could accept my minolta lenses... but then i took a look on some 6x6 slides and i've heard my rolleiflex crying in my drawer...so i said, no to the dark side:D
I hope i won't be disappointed. Of myself,i mean...The scanner is of course good enough, if I manage to properly use it.
 
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