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.

[min8ive.livejournal.com]

What, not gonna get today's woot? ;-)

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Now that you've got it I should tell you the downsides. OK, I'm only remembering one: It will not remember the Digital-ICE checkbox (or several others). Each set of scans you have to remember to specify d-ice, color correction, whatever.

Also, if you have 'super slides', you probably need to take it out of thumbnail mode and figure out how to manually mark off the slides. Or do this any time that the automatically-find-the-image code doesn't find the image correctly.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I'm not very keen, I've already got one, you see?

(I told her I've already got one! ~snicker~)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I can live with that. Almost everything I have to scan is 35mm anyway. But I have about 2000 slides left to go, and I wasn't looking forward to poking them into the LS30 one at a time.

It's a bummer that the ICE is probably going to keep Epson from releasing Linux drivers for this. Epson has released SANE drivers for most of their scanners, but I'm betting there are NDA issues here.

[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. :(

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I had to do the same thing with the Nikon software...

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

The only time I had trouble with the Nikon was when there was a single image strip with a lot of lead-in crud. i.e. the beginning of the roll, one image, but overall as long as 3 images. In that case feeding it in backwords almost always worked. A good thing since the only other option was to use the strip holder and do it a frame at a time.

The Epson at least has a manual mode. It's just not obvious that it's there.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

I had a couple strips I had to do that with as well. Thankfully it worked out. Most of what I was using was 110 slides with 2" adapters, but because of the slight variances in things the process was something like:

- Insert slide.
- Wait for preview.
- Move crop frame to encompass image.
- Set ICE settings (if used, it doesn't work right with Kodachrome)
- Click Scan
- Eject Slide

Have you played with VueScan before? I've got a license for it as well, but after spending 3-4 hours with it I couldn't figure out how to have it automatically roughly scan all frames on an inserted strip or single slide.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

I tried VueScan. Worthless piece of ... Everything was manual magic numbers with nothing to help you zero on on the right value. i.e. Set Whitepoint. Instead of letting you click on the bit you wanted the whitepoint to be, or even showing you the current numerical value, you just had to grab a magic number of of the air.

Even when I did scan things, its much vaunted custom reversal for different negative types didn't work as well as the automatic in the Nikon.

Maybe it's gotten better, this was many years ago, but I just couldn't see the point.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

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

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you hit it right on the head. From the docs and other things I was reading it seems as if there is some grand, great way to automate all of that, but I just couldn't figure it out.

I still think it might be nice if one wants to really play with scanning in one image and has lots of time to play with it, but for bulk use the Nikon stuff really seemed to work best.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I thought VueScan was crap as well. I think he's got a few good algorithms at the core, but he's done nothing to make them at all easy to use. The interface is glaringly "the least he could do". As soon as he had something that was barely functional, he shipped, and last I looked he'd put no effort into improving that.