Film Scanners

A
Posted By
artphotog
Jul 30, 2003
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521
Replies
8
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Closed
Looking for a new film scanner. I had a Polaroid Springscan 35 it sucked on color negatives. What are the preferred scanners as far as accuracy and quality?

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LH
Lawrence Hudetz
Jul 30, 2003
Try the Epson 3200.
JS
John Scribner
Jul 30, 2003
PrimeFilm 1800u seems to work well.
H
Ho
Jul 30, 2003
The Nikon Coolscan 4000 is coming down in price, now offered with a rebate I think. It has Digital Ice which is a modern day miracle. I use the Nikon Coolscan IV (its little brother) and I have been very happy with it.
DE
david evanson
Jul 31, 2003
How about the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400, I replaced my on Nikon LS20 with one last week – excellent results. (Does not appear to work with Vuescan though).

<http://www.minoltaeurope.com/pe/digital_photography.html>

On paper it has a better spec than Nikon’s LS40 – 5400 dpi optical 16bit colour depth Digital ICE and both USB 2.0/1.1 and Firewire interface. It is probably equivalent to the LS4000 ED for about £400 less.
DE
david evanson
Jul 31, 2003
Bill,
Thanks for the info on Vuescan – I did use it with my LS20 and it gave better results than the Nikon software so I will download the new version.

As for the 5400 dpi resolution – it is far more than required most of the time, but it is nice to have if you are only interested in a small area of the frame.

Looking at results from some high speed film stock you definitely start to see the grain before the pixels. But my old Kodachrome 25 still has the edge.
BL
Bill Lamp
Aug 1, 2003
You still have K-25 in the freezer??!!!! Can you still get it processed?? If the answer to both is yes, how much for two rolls and where do you send it to be processed?

Bill
DE
david evanson
Aug 1, 2003
No – unfortunately no K-25 in the freezer (although I did keep my film in the fridge) I meant after scanning some old K-25 slides taken 20 years ago they still show little grain even a 5400 dpi.

Downloaded the new version of Vuescan and it does work well the Minolta – after a bit of a false start – I didn’t realise you had to select ‘Calibrate Scanner’ first, I will have to start reading ALL of the pop-up dialogues in future. (this was unnecessary with the LS20). The colour matching appears to be much better than Minolta’s own software – all I need to do now is figure out how to enable the Digital ICE feature via Vuescan.
BL
Bill Lamp
Aug 1, 2003
david,

Vuescan uses it’s own methods. Some have reported it as being better than Digital ICE as ONLY the "dusted" spot or line is softened. I can’t answer that, as the NikonScan software wouldn’t run more than one scan before requireing a system re-boot, as I couldn’t really make a comparison.

Dust & scratches, grain reduction, and color restore are located in the FILTERS section of VueScan.

Bill

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