Anyone has experience with MF film scanner vs. Epson V700 ?

Hi,

I am working exclusively in film these days and I am looking for a better way of scanning my negatives. I am interested in particular in the comparison between an Epson flatbed V700 (which I currently use) and a MF film scanner like a Reflecta MF5000 / Braun FS-120 . I am not very happy with how my images turn out with the Epson V700 and I am sure the reason is me not being skilled enough in scanning. It takes me about an hour to get rid of dust and spots that get introduced to the scan by dust under the flatbed-glass and on top even with the betterscannng.com filmholder with AN glass, it often takes me multiple reseating attempts of the film before it is in the right focal plane. Especially the dust under the scanner glas drives me nuts, since I am not sure on how to get it out without damaging the scanner.
Also quality wise I wonder what the difference between a midrange MF film scanner and the Epson V700 would be and if you feel it is worth the upgrade. I am currently using the Epson V700 with the better scanning.com filmholder with AN glass and for software I go back and forth between vuescan and silverlight se

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts in advance
Dennis

my experience with negative scanning i limited as I consider it a bridge technologysoon to vanish anyway.I only scan negatives with Vuescan and an older Epson F3200,which give me very decent resultsbut,my D800 has replaced all MFfilm work;never liked SilverScan. Vuescan is so much simplerand gives me more control.

ralphlambrecht said:

my experience with negative scanning i limited as I consider it a bridge technologysoon to vanish anyway.I only scan negatives with Vuescan and an older Epson F3200,which give me very decent resultsbut,my D800 has replaced all MFfilm work;never liked SilverScan. Vuescan is so much simplerand gives me more control.

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Thank you Ralph! I do no longer own any digital gear, so using a digital camera as a replacement is not an option for me. In the end I get the best results by making a silver print in 8x10 and scanning the print, but I would really like to be able to make decent scans of my negatives, as I do not really print all my negs.

I don't have experience with the V700, but I do have experience with a Nikon LS-8000. It is very adequate for both 35mm and MF. I use Vuescan. It is, as Ralph said, easy to use.

Perhaps others can chime in with other MF film scanners.

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rbultman said:

I don't have experience with the V700, but I do have experience with a Nikon LS-8000. It is very adequate for both 35mm and MF. I use Vuescan. It is, as Ralph said, easy to use.

Perhaps others can chime in with other MF film scanners.

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Thank you! How much time do you have to usually spend on post for a scanned B/W image to clean dust etc. if you have a reasonably good image? Any chance you can post an image of a scann without any post ?

I don't spend typically more than a few minutes in Lightroom spotting. Dust itself is easiest to spot. Water spots are the worst. I rarely have a negative that is so bad that I need to rescan it. I'll see if I can post something but I won't be able to get to it for a week or so.

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I can only compare a Nikon 9000 and an Imacon 949 to the V700 - both blow it out of the water for Medium format, the Imacon especially for ease of use on a modern operating system - The Nikon is very good solid but slow it will work on windows 7 - not saying the Epson is bad just limited by what it is .. a prosumer flatbed that can just about do anything with film moderately well.. i have scanned 8 x 10 negs on the platen .. wet mounted on the platen .. used the betterscanning medium format holder as well to get the right focal plane - so we have a genuine 1200 ppi on the platen - rated at just under 2400 with the holder > V 700 .... Nikon 4000 ppi .. Imacon 35mm 8000 ppi and i have medium format scans at 7000 x 6900 from the Imacon - depends what you want to do with it i guess and how deep your pockets are - i was lucky picked up the Imacon cheapish.

I should have said that I use Vuescan with the LS-8000 on Windows 7.

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rince said:

Hi,

I am working exclusively in film these days and I am looking for a better way of scanning my negatives.

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As everyone here can attest, my answer would be "get a decent drum scanner". The Epson 750 is at the bottom of the scanning spectrum. The least amount of quality. There are lots of other options for you....

Lenny

I'm using an Epson V600 which does less well than a V700. Before deciding what to do about scanning, what do you intend to do with the scans? Prints? What size? etc?

It only takes me about ten minutes to remove spots from a 6x7. I've used Elements and Lightroom spot removal and both seem to work pretty well. I'll set the display to 1:1 100% and then start at the top left corner removing all spots. I then drag the image to the right so the next section shows but leaving some overlap to the last section so I don't miss any spots. I keep doing that until I reach the right border. Then I scroll the image down to a new section leaving some overlap again, this time to the part above. I then move section by section to the left until I reach the left border. I then move down again with overlap and keep this process going until I reach the bottom and cleaned all sections. I do the spot removal first so in cae I decide later to change other kinds of edits, I don't have to re-do spot removal.

You can check my Flickr site of 6x7 and 35mm scans of both negative and positive color and negative BW. Good luck.

Thanks everyone. Unfortunately I am not in a position to buy a drum scanner or something close to the price range. My budget will not allow for ore than 2k for scanner+software+IT8 target. I mainly use the scans for online presentations, that such as a website or flickr, but also to make some smallish 8x10 prints for photo books etc. . I am no professional and I am not making any money with photography, therefore the cap on the investment. I am just often disappointed seeing the scans, especially when I printed the negs in a darkroom before and know how they could look like ... But again, I am no good at all when it comes to scanning.
Thank you all for your help. What I got out of the thread is, that the specialised MF filmscanner will be better quality, but I still have to improve my scanning technique, since others can do perfectly fine scans with comparable equipment.

$2000 buys you a Plustek 120 film scanner where you just load the film in into a holder and feed into the machine. I've seen tremendously good results from medium format negatives from this scanner.

Sure there are lots of better options, but the V700 can make fine 8x10 prints from good medium format scans using a glass holder. I generally use my V700 for proof sheets and scan individual frames on a Nikon 9000, but no one will complain about the quality from the V700 at 3x or 4x. Of course, a lot of this depends of the quality of the negative, the scan, and the image editing. If you are getting better results scanning paper prints then you probably just need to spend more time developing your film scanning skills. You will need to do this even if you spend the $$$ on a dedicated film scanner. There is plenty of craft involved in scanning film.

What software do you use with your Nikon (LS?) 9000?

I have been using Vuescan with an LS-8000 but have not had much luck finding material regarding improving my scanning craft. Do you have any suggestions?

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I use both Nikon Scan or VueScan. There are thousands of posts about scanning here, and probably lots of good tips. Get started by turning off any automatic processing in your scanning software and correctly setting the resolution, bit depth, and white and black points before manually tweaking the curve. I would reserve major changes for Photoshop as the tools are much more flexible. A good scan can be destroyed by careless image editing. Especially beware over sharpening, and funky conversion to b&w. Curve layers provide much of Photoshop's power, so learn to use these effectively.

rbultman said:

What software do you use with your Nikon (LS?) 9000?

I have been using Vuescan with an LS-8000 but have not had much luck finding material regarding improving my scanning craft. Do you have any suggestions?

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Following these instructions resulted in the biggest increase in the quality of my scanning. I do no curve adjustments in Vuescan. I only adjust the brightness so the JPG files look decent, but I also save to TIFF DNG format and inport that into Lightroom. I don't use photoshop.

I'll look through the available scanning information on this site and elsewhere. I also have the Vuescan Bible book but found it to be a little more directed towards beginners. I'll review that again anyway to see what I may have missed.

Good advice from Ken -- his results speak for themselves. Not sure why you are scanning as 8-bit jpegs since you can always create these from your 16-bit images. Maybe you are having some issues related to color space conversion? You will simplify things if you scan directly to Adobe98. If you upload a scan you consider problematical you are sure to get some helpful comments No offense to Lightroom users, but last time I looked at Lightroom, Photoshop was still clearly superior for editing images. I know many make do with Lightroom, but non-destructive layers are too powerful to do without.

I should have been more specific. The JPG's are only used as "thumbnails" in the file system. I never edit these. It would be nice if I could just do DNG + real JPG thumbnails as I don't do anything at all with the JPG's. That would save a little disk space. I do scan to the Adobe98 color space. I do mostly B&W film although lately I have been doing some Portra. I just got back from vacation and have 7 rolls of Portra in 220 to send out for development.

I import the DNG's into Lightroom so I have the full 16-bit capability there. I almost never use curves to adjust the image but use the exposure, highlight, shadow, whites, and blacks sliders to adjust tonality. I use the gradient feature somewhat and rarely the brush feature. Lightroom is non-destructive but does not support layers. Never having used layers I don't miss them. I do a litle sharpening and noise reduction too. Sometimes a little image deformation to correct for convergence in buildings.

I take no offense at your comment regarding Lightroom vs PS. I am too lazy to learn PS. My sister in law uses PS professionally and has showed me the basics of image editing using it. If I made money from my photography I might learn PS. As it is, I am still using LR4, which suits me just fine. I was a user of Bibble Pro (now After Shot) but moved to Lightroom because it supported larger image sizes. I would be willing to try PS but I am ignorant regarding what advantages it brings over LR.

Regarding settings, I use what Ken suggests and also use Fine Mode and Multi Exposure. I have played with the Analog Gain settings, assuming they may help with difficult negatives, but they seem highly non-linear and therefore difficult to use. I have also used Lock Film Base and Lock Image Color but for C-41 color only. I assume these last two are really only useful for color negatives with their orange base. Beyond that I'm not sure what other tweaks make sense to use. I am happy with most of my scans. If I am unhappy with a scan it is usually because a frame was under- or overexposed or I made some mistake when developing B&W. GIGO applies to scanning too, I assume.

Sorry, I think it was Dennis who said he was not entirely satisfied with his scans, so I meant to respond to his post.
Hey, Dennis -- take a look at Ken Lee's web site for some scanning tips.