New scanner

[johnridley]

Thanks to a memory nudge from the GT list, I went up to Best Buy and found that the excellent Epson V500 scanner is on sale for $199 again. kevinnickerson bought one a few months back and likes it, that's good enough for me. I didn't buy one before the sale was off then, but I have one in hand now.

I looked at other scanners, but once you've used a Digital ICE capable scanner, the rest are just pure garbage and a waste of time. This has the latest version, probably v4 or v5, whereas the Nikon had v1. Supposedly the new software does an outstanding job of automatically correcting age-related film color shifts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_ICE

I've put off my slide scanning project for several years now, because the Nikon LS30 scanner that I have, while quite nice, only scans one slide at a time. I had actually gotten the LS30 out of the basement a couple of months ago, and 2 or 3 weekends ago I installed the SCSI card. Then it's only a matter of about an hour of wrestling with installing just the right driver in just the right order and rebooting a few times to get the scanner running. I was thinking about getting started on the project again this weekend while half the house was out at Capricon.

I also got to use up the Best Buy gift card which I thought I'd never use, because I don't do Best Buy anymore. (a couple of years back they came right out and said they didn't want the business of bargain shoppers; that's me, so to heck with them. Unless there's a really good sale going on...)

Now to put my Nikon and my old Canon flatbed on eBay and see if I can recoup the $199. It's a bummer the ADF for the V500 is also $199. Supply and demand I suppose.

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed at how well ICE works. The only problem I've had with it were when scanning Kodachrome, specifically because of the varying physical depth of the emulsion.

This section of my writeup on scanning slides and negatives touches on it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Interesting writeup. It'd be interesting to test the V500 against the Coolscan V. KN has switched to a V500 from a Coolscan LS-3000 I think (I bought my Coolscan LS-30 at about the same time, probably 7+ years ago). He got it mainly to do bigger formats but I think he believes it to do at least as good a job.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

LS-2000, and I'd say the v500 doesn't do "as good" it does better. The color conversion is more accurate, and resolution goes up to "too high".

The downside is that loading negative strips is fiddly compared to just slipping the end into the Nikon's feeder. The flip to that is that it can do two strips at once so you can go away for longer while it thinks.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

It's not that complete, it's just more of a this-is-what-I-did thing. I wanted to get a bunch of old stuff digital as easily as possible, and the film autofeeder and slide holder was crucial.

Also, it really helped that the resale value of the Coolscan V is just barely below the new price.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm going to go unload the LS30 on eBay. I paid $750 for it, but that's pushing 10 years ago and they're still going for over $200, which is more than I paid for this (better) replacement.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Oh, and just so you know, I didn't try to clean up any of those scans. They are straight out of the scanner. The reason they are so small, though, is because they are 110. :(

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

It doesn't work on B&W either. The emulsion is too thin and everything goes to a mass of blur.