pass around scanner test : 1 neg, many scanners

[aad]

The 4990 looks a lot like 4490, especially the loss of detail on slides.

 

[sf]

I just looked at the scans on George's site - the film scanners pull out a lot more shadow detail than did my Epson. I guess I'll save my pennies and buy a Nikon Coolscan 9000.

yeah. I noticed a huge difference in my scans from the Epson 3170 vs Multi Pro. I have detail where I thought it once was only darkness.

Dmax 3.2 vs 4.8.

Big difference.

 

[Pherdinand]

Well... $200 vs $2500 ? I'd expect something in change for such a price difference.
George, have you sold the multi pro finally? I see it's gone from the ads list.

 

[RObert Budding]

Have you read the photo-i and Ken Rockwell "reviews" of the Epson 4990? They claim that it's so good that you won't need a film scanner. I always doubted that claim - now I can see how absurd that claim was. Still the results aren't bad for a $400 scanner. But I'll wait for a real scanner before plunding in - too much labor is involved to use an inferior scanner.

 

[sf]

I have sold my Multi Pro. Not happy about it, but oh well. It was an unnecessary luxury. I have actually bought the Epson V700 to replace it. And, while the V700 feels like a toy compared to the Minolta, it performs remarkably well.

This is a scan of some Neopan 100 developed in Arista Premium developer.


Minolta crop, V700 crop, Minolta full image.

 

[sf]

here is E6 (provia 400F) scanned at 4000 dpi on the V700 and 3200 dpi on the Minolta.

The V700 image has been sharpened 1 pxl at 100% and color and curves have been adjusted to try and match the minolta. Came close enough.

V700 full image / Minolta full image

 

[sf]

and here are the crops

v700 unedited, Minolta unedited, V700 edited to match minolta.

I notice the V700 is noisy when sharpened, it doesn't have perfect color, and it has a very very slighly narrower dynamic range as is visible in these scans. The V700 is close in terms of resolution on this slide - which is a reasonable real-world sort of shot instead of some test pattern. The V700 does smooth grain nicely in B&W.

Bottom line, buy the dedicated scanner for slide film. I actually like the V700 more for B&W. So far.

I also notice the V700 has not the nice subtle colors that the Minolta has so well. This might be an issue for scanning portraits.

 

[Gid]

Its an interesting exercise, but ultimately it just dissolves into pixel peeping. The real test is what the final print looks like - something that the guy at photo-i makes a point of. There are so many other factors that can affect the final image - film, exposure, focus, lens used, development - that scanner performance makes a much smaller relative difference.

I use the Epson 4990 and I'm happy with the results I get using Silverfast both from 120 and 35mm - B&W, C41 and E6. The best results by far are from B&W and E6 (at least to my eyes). This doesn't mean that I couldn't improve upon the results by using a high end scanner, but would they be noticeable to a print viewer (who BTW probably wouldn't have a loupe or densiometer to hand 🙂 )

george,

IMHO, you haven't lost much switching to the V700 from the Multi Pro, but you've gained some $$ 🙂