Scanner advice - again.

[Larky]

Hi all.

I'm in need of a new neg scanner, mine is an old Jessops PF 3600 which I use with Vuescan. It's unreliable, keeps refusing to let VS see it and I'm sure it's internals are made of dust.

I'm going to start shooting medium format along with 35mm, so I was thinking about a flatbed with decent neg scanning capability.

It'll be hooked up to a Mac.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, along with views on whatever you use - why you use it, is it any good etc. Should I stick to a decent neg scanner and not a flatbed? I like to mount my chosen pics in archival quality slide mounts so, maybe that would be best?

Take care, A.

 

[venchka]

Quoting Ted Harris from the Large Format Forum:

Colin, I hope I am one of the three 🙂. One of the problems, and I know I sound like a broken record, is that folks keep looking for massive improvements and it just isn't going to happen. The gains are small and incremental and that is all you're gonna get. Beyond that, the M1 produces the best scans I have seen from a a conumer scanner and the objective test I have done show it has slightly better resolution than the V750. Sometime in the next two week I'll get to the Dmax tests and I expect it will be in the range of 2.2-2.4. Having said all that, would I replace a 4990, V700 or V750 with an M1? Probably not. If I had an older scanner I'd replace it with the M1. If I ere getting my first consumer scanner it would be the M1. Is there anyway it can perform up to the level of the IQsmart 3 or Cezanne or a drum? Absolutely not. In fact yesterday, while working with a client we did a scan on the M1 of a negative we had scanned earlier on the IQ3. The comparison convinced him that, rather than buying a Nikon 9000 for MF and 35mm and an M1 for LF he would hold out for a used Cezanne or a new IQsmart 2 (which with rebate you can bring in for 8K+).

BTW, the M1 scan for the scanner comparison on the LF home page should be up soon same for 3 or 4 others including the Cezanne. Scans are all done and Leigh Perry was finishing the updates this weekend. The changes now need to be made to the Home page.

So, look around for a good used Epson 4990 on the low end of the budget scale. Buy A Nikon Coolscan 9000 on the high end of the budget scale. Everything in between won't be a lot better than the Epson 4990 and nowhere near as good as the Nikon Coolscan 9000.

Good luck.

 

[mfogiel]

Larky,
My take is: you will get better pictures from a Zorki+Jupiter scanned properly, than from the Leica MP+Summicron scanned on a flatbed. If you want to do MF too, the lowest you should aim at is the old Minolta Multi Pro, and Possibly the CS 9000 with the glass holder. No flatbed I know about has a dual glass holder (not even Doug Fisher's holder has a dual glass) and without it scanning a sharp MF film is just a waste. I say this because I have both the CS 9000 and the Epson v750, and the results are quite evident. Here's a sharp Hasselblad scan from CS9000:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59177039@N00/2243010610/sizes/o/

 

[Ducky]

I'm quite happy with my Canoscan 4400.