Film Scanners

[ahrneely]

Hello all:

For years I have shot film (I love my 4x5) and I'm just now starting to get into the world of digital photography and all of the post-production work that entails. As part of my newly restored passion for photography, I'm attempting to digitize the best of my work from film. As I'm in a very rural area, I'd have to ship my film out to be professionally scanned. I've done a single sheet of 35mm negatives as a trial and found unsatisfactory results (e.g. the scans were 8-bit Tiff files which gave me very little latitude to address all of the contrast issues that came with the files). It also seems very cost prohibitive to ship all the film I want to scan (6x7 and 4x5 included) so I thought it would be better if I could find a mid-range film scanner that could handle film up to 4x5 without any issues. The best I've been able to find is this Epson Perfection V750-M Scanner.

I'm wondering if any of you have any experience or knowledge of a quality film scanner that will allow me to scan 16-bit images and can accommodate up to 4x5 film under the ridiculous costs of a drum scanner.

[KentDub]

I have the Epson Perfection (I think the actual model is 4800, could be wrong though). It sports 48-bit internal processing, but also will ship a 16bpc image to photoshop. It creates great scans. Beware that some scanners will do 48-bit internal processing but won't output a 48-bit image. I've used it for some old 35mm film and a lot of old slides. Scanning old film and making a project out of restoring them is a great way to learn photoshop/PP.

[ahrneely]

Years ago I had an Epson Perfection Photo series scanner that I loved until I noticed it was leaving a strange, near Moire pattern, on every negative or transparency I scanned. It turned out the scanner was reading through the film and picking up part of the light used to illuminate the film. I'm concerned that something like this will happen again. I would surmise you have not experienced anything like this with the Epson you are using, Kent?

P.S. Thanks for the quick reply.