Comparison: Howtek, Leafscan, EverSmart

[sanking]

I recently made a comparison with three different scanners, using three different MF negatives, two color and one B&W. I made two of the scans myself with my own scanners, one with a Scitex EverSmart Pro, the other with a Leafscan 45. Another person, a professional operator, scanned the same negatives with a Howtek 6500. The EverSmart Pro scan was made at 6450 spi, and then sampled down to 5000 spi, the Leafscan 45 was scanned at 5080 spi, and the Howtek scan was made at 5000 spi. The scan with the Leafscan 45 was made in two passes and stitched.

The B&W negative contained a resolution target, and I am including with this post very small crops of the central part of the target with the three scanners. The resolution in the original MF negative, which was made with a Mamiya 711 and 65mm lens, was about 85 lppm. You be the judge of scan quality. My opinion is that the scans made with the Howtek 6500 and EverSmart Pro are about equal, with the Leafscan 45 just a tad behind.

I applied just a bit of recovery sharpening with unsharp mask ( 100, .4, 0) in Photoshop CS3, and adjusted levels to match contrast with the three samples as best I could.

All three scans pull virtually everything in the negative out, which means that the effective resolution of each was about 4000 spi. Resolution with the Howtek and EverSmart Pro appears to be about equal, and the Leafscan 45 just a tad behind. But grain is also much more pronounced with the Howtek, and the EverSmart Pro scan (dry mount on the bed) and the Leaf scan (fluid mount) are much smoother in terms of grain.

The entire scene, with the target in the middle, is also attached. The crop area is the target, in the middle of the large target.


Sandy King

 

[L Gebhardt]

Sandy, what happened to the Eversmart and the Leaf scan crops? There seems to be some sort of strange sharpening and JPEG compression pattern going on.

 

[sanking]

Sandy, what happened to the Eversmart and the Leaf scan crops? There seems to be some sort of strange sharpening and JPEG compression pattern going on.

Yes, there are definitely some artifacts in the EverSmart scan, not sure why. There is a default sharpening mode that the EverSmart reverts back to unless I change it just before the scan. This may have happened with the scan, in fact based on the artifacts I believe it did. However, sharpening does not improve actual resolution when you are evaluating a target so it has no practical consequence for this test.

I don't know what to say about the Leafscan 45 file. There is no sharpening at all available with this scanner, at least when using the Photoshop 2.2 plugin, as I did in this case. And I am virtually certain that I did not add any sharpening later. If for no other reason sharpening is irrelevant to resolution.


Sandy