jlw
Rangefinder camera pedant
I have the Canon FS4000US, and I use it mostly to scan silver-based films. It produces scans with high sharpness, and is capable of emitting enough light to punch through dense areas of a negative. (The "long exposure pass" option in VueScan can help with this.)
But yes, it is very slow -- partly because of the scanner mechanics and partly because of the USB 1.1 interface. When doing a full-resolution, 16-bit-grayscale scan, I usually plan on going away and doing something else for 10 minutes or so. If your workflow involves making one or two really good scans per evening, it might be just what you need (if you can bag one at a good price); if you're more volume-oriented, I suspect you'll find it frustrating.
One more bugaboo of scanning silver-based films that hasn't come up yet in this thread, but which is a very significant problem, is grain aliasing. I've railed about this before on other threads -- because it's the bane of existance of anyone who scans high-speed silver films, and yet scanner manufacturers and equipment reviewers/publicists almost never acknowledge it.
Grain aliasing is the effect of an interaction between the random pattern of grain edges, and the regular pattern of the scanner's imager. Its result is that a print from a scanned negative looks grainier than a similar print made in a "wet" darkroom.
It affects silver-based films more severely than chromogenic ones, because the grain edges in silver films are more well-defined; it afflicts one brand of scanner just about as much as another; there's very little you can do to suppress it that doesn't reduce fine details in the image; and scanner manufacturers don't seem to give a crap about doing anything about it, because 99.9% of their customers are scanning color negatives and slides.
The only trick I've found that seems to help at least a little is to scan the negative twice, then composite the two scans in Photoshop or another image editor. No scanner is mechanically precise enough to position the film carriage exactly the same for successive scans, so scanning twice slightly alters the relationship between the grain edges and the imager. When you composite the images, they're "averaged" enough to reduce the effects of grain aliasing without reducing detail sharpness (at least not much.)
Having to scan everything twice (I also set one scan to favor the highlights and the other to favor the shadows, to get a fuller tonal range) makes the slowness of the FS4000 even more galling -- but since my goal usually is just to get one good scan per session, it's something I can live with for now. Your mileage may vary!
But yes, it is very slow -- partly because of the scanner mechanics and partly because of the USB 1.1 interface. When doing a full-resolution, 16-bit-grayscale scan, I usually plan on going away and doing something else for 10 minutes or so. If your workflow involves making one or two really good scans per evening, it might be just what you need (if you can bag one at a good price); if you're more volume-oriented, I suspect you'll find it frustrating.
One more bugaboo of scanning silver-based films that hasn't come up yet in this thread, but which is a very significant problem, is grain aliasing. I've railed about this before on other threads -- because it's the bane of existance of anyone who scans high-speed silver films, and yet scanner manufacturers and equipment reviewers/publicists almost never acknowledge it.
Grain aliasing is the effect of an interaction between the random pattern of grain edges, and the regular pattern of the scanner's imager. Its result is that a print from a scanned negative looks grainier than a similar print made in a "wet" darkroom.
It affects silver-based films more severely than chromogenic ones, because the grain edges in silver films are more well-defined; it afflicts one brand of scanner just about as much as another; there's very little you can do to suppress it that doesn't reduce fine details in the image; and scanner manufacturers don't seem to give a crap about doing anything about it, because 99.9% of their customers are scanning color negatives and slides.
The only trick I've found that seems to help at least a little is to scan the negative twice, then composite the two scans in Photoshop or another image editor. No scanner is mechanically precise enough to position the film carriage exactly the same for successive scans, so scanning twice slightly alters the relationship between the grain edges and the imager. When you composite the images, they're "averaged" enough to reduce the effects of grain aliasing without reducing detail sharpness (at least not much.)
Having to scan everything twice (I also set one scan to favor the highlights and the other to favor the shadows, to get a fuller tonal range) makes the slowness of the FS4000 even more galling -- but since my goal usually is just to get one good scan per session, it's something I can live with for now. Your mileage may vary!
