New Scanner (OTish)

boomhower wrote on 9/29/2005, 12:15 PM
My new Epson scanner arrived today. I was a bit skeptical about how it would scan 35mm negs but after playing around with it I'm pretty impressed. Scanned some negatives from 1988 and they came out really nice. Anyone looking for a scanner this one is worth a look (especiallly as it is under $100).

Keith

PS Epson 3490

Comments

farss wrote on 9/29/2005, 2:39 PM
Nikon Coolscan 5000 here, a bit more expensive than the Epson but at least I don't have to feed the slides in one at a time!
The ONLY thing it doesn't handle very well is some ancient B&W reversal film, I suspect it's Kodachrome, well at least if I tell the scanner that's what it is it copes fairly well. I can get slightly better results scanning to 16bit tiffs and doing some work on them in PS but that's a fairly tedious process.
Bob.
RalphM wrote on 9/29/2005, 2:48 PM
The new flatbeds have come a long way toward meeting the low end dedicated slide scanners, and they are very convenient if you are dealing with other than 35mm transparencies.

The upper end Epsons ~ $400 have Digital Ice capability on slides and prints. Using the included frames, eight 35mm slides can be batch scanned resulting in 8 image files - takes the tedium out of feeding one at a time.
boomhower wrote on 9/29/2005, 4:29 PM
This one has a tray that I place the negative in (6 frames total) and it will scan all the frames as individual images - sweet. For slides, it will do 3 at one time. It has some dust and scratch removal and color correction but I just dump them into Corel and fix them up.......

Keith
RalphM wrote on 9/29/2005, 7:20 PM
You may want to look at the free dust and scratch removal utility from Polaroid called PolaDSR. Just Google it. Pretty effective....
johnmeyer wrote on 9/29/2005, 8:48 PM
You may want to look at the free dust and scratch removal utility from Polaroid called PolaDSR.

I just downloaded it and tried it out. I didn't have very good luck with it.
farss wrote on 9/30/2005, 4:06 AM
Trust me, if you've got a LOT of slides (like 5,000) to scan the Nikon is the way to go. It seems they pull a very neat trick to get rid of some of the grot, scan in both visible and IR, the IR goes through the emulsion but not the grot, that way the scanner knows what needs to be removed.
I just finished scanning some very nice ladies photographed by someone who knows how to take a photo and they look just magnificent (the photos that is, ladies are good too), 16 bit tiff at max res are a bit big to handle at 120MB (don't drop those onto the Vegas T/L!).
Looking at how good these look I think it's time to dust off the old OM1.
JJKizak wrote on 9/30/2005, 5:50 AM
Usually I have to open up the slide in Photopaint 12 and zoom it about 200% to see all of the imperfections, then spend about 15 minutes either smudging, painting the decay marks or dust marks or picture cracks to clean everything up. Sometimes the smudge tool can blend all of the pixelation together to enhance the focus. A lot of work but it can be done at the 200% zoom level. It took about 8 hrs on one particular picture of my buddies wife's baby picture which was really bad but I saved it.

JJK