Scanning black and white film with the ProScan 7200
Scanning black and white film with the ProScan 7200
Hi,
I am using this scanner for about two weeks now. In the beginning I did some testing and found out that the Cyberview software that came with the scanner worked quite nice with slide film but is IMHO useless for scanning black and white film. My impression is that shadows loose detail very quickly and and the grays tend to have a very unnatural, almost artificial look in some areas. The pictures just don't look right. One thing that is completely annoying about this software is that it will not save your preferences. It asks you "save you personal settings?" when you close it, but even if you choose "yes", everything is back to factory settings. Every time you start the program you have to go through all the menus and set everything from scratch. VERY annoying indeed.
So I bit the bullet and downloaded the Silverfast demo. I liked the results with black and white film. Scanning times appear to be also a bit faster than with the bundled software. I did some tests with the multiscan and multiexposure feature in Silverfast but couldn't find any benefit, so I went for the cheapest version (Silverfast SE). The software based dust and scratch removal in SE is rather useless, so don't expect too much from it. The Ai (full) version of Silverfast is supposed to have a more sophisticated tool but I can't comment on that. Of course ICE won't work with black and white films, but works nicely with colour slides. I would have given VueScan a chance but as for now, this scanner is not supported by VueScan.
So if you consider buying the ProScan 7200 for scanning black and white, be prepared to spend some extra money for a decent scanning software.
John