I would go with the Epson it puts you in control. Personally I had the worst experience ever using the Ag film processing service and won't use them for anything.
For scanning, the trouble with these commercial machines is that they are setup for consumer tastes and I found scans were over sharp and over bright so when looking at high magnification had a spotted appearance. I have an Epson 4990, the predecessor to the V700, which I use for medium format and Minolta 5400 for 35mm.
If you don't want to invest in a scanner try one of alternative suppliers mentioned above. I've had good scans from Peak Imaging but if you want high resolution it does cost. I don't understand the premium charged for higher res scans as time taken is not directly proportionate to the file size.
Thanks very much for that Richard - running down our business on a public forum without any explanation. Then demonstrating that you have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to scanning. It's funny, you seemed perfectly pleasant on the phone when discussing the issue and we offered to scan all the transparancies (at the largest size) and spot them digitally, free of charge, and offered free 12" prints too. Shows how vindictive people are when they are faceless on an internet forum.
I'll give other readers some background to the problem that occured with Richards work, then I'll get back to the original question about TIFF files.
We had a processing problem with our E6 - it was a straight forward glitch similar to that which will have afflicfted every single lab in the history of commercial processing. But it was very unfortunate, of course. The problem involved dirt on the processed transparancies which meant the processing quality was below the standard that was expected. There was no issue with colour or contrast though.
The commercial scanners, like the Noritsu we use, are not "set up for consumer tastes" - this is total rubbish. The only way to better the output quality from an HS-1800 is to scan on an Imacon or drum scanner - but it would be totally impossible to scan all the films in a commercial lab this way and considering the speed at which the Noritsu scans a film, the quality is truly stunning.
Having complained about "consumer set up" of these scanners, what is most extraordinary, Richard, is that you recommend Peak, who use Fuji Frontiers, which are a good machine, but these really were designed with the retail market, which is why they are commonly found in Boots and Jessops. This is bourne out by the way the Frontier scanners are a fiddle to use with 120 film and the resulting files can not be rez'ed up very much.
There are a multitude of settings in the software and, when scanning for lots of different customers, as the lab, we have to find a happy medium. If a customer likes less sharpness then anything can be done. Where customers want something specific we do this, and have a book where preferences are recorded for repeat customers.
But most important is to produce scans or prints with a consistant colour balance and density and this is down to the person operating the equipment, be it Noritsu, Frontier, Imacon etc. who needs to have the requisite experience to do this.
In terms of saving the files as TIFF, the Noritsu software will allow this for the medium size scans, but not the large ones, simply because they would be very large to handle. We advise customers who want a non-lossy file format to simply save-as PSD in photoshop or TIFF and then take it from there.
The final thing I would say is that we are processing hundreds of C41, B&W and E6 films on a weekly basis and the vast majority of these are scanned. We price the scans very competitively, and one of the reasons we can do this is because of 1. the efficiency of the Noritsu equipment; and 2. the efficiency of our people using it. And we have a very large number of repeat customers, some of whom are sending us films evey week. The majority of our customers are very knowledgeable and very specific about their requirements. A number of them are full time professional and very experienced. Apart from the incident with the E6, which very unfortunately afflicted Richard's film, we have not had any other issues like this and, with E6 in particular, we have a lot of very demanding customers.
Matthew Wells
