Epson Perfection V600 Photo hand-me-down scanning with massive streaking

[peterB1966]

Hi, all - a friend gave me a family member's old Epson V600 just as I was returning to shooting on film, so I was frothing to develop my first roll and scan it. But the scans are awful!

What I need to know is: is this normal; is there an affordable fix;would I need to take it in, etc?

Some notes:

• The film looks fine, and you will see in the examples below that the streaking on the same photo looks totally different on different scans
• I don't have the film-holder trays yet (it takes weeks to get it to Cape Town, so I am still waiting for my order) and there was massive streaking on my first scan, which the AI suggested might also be cause/exacerbated by light leakage - so I have cut a window into some black card and am using that for now (you will see the grey underside in the scans)
• The first attempt was scanning a mono image in colour mode - gave me a massive yellow streaks running across the strip. When I converted the image to greyscale, it disappeared, so then I scanned in black and white mode, but there was massive grey streaking. So then I scanned it in colour again, and reconverted to grayscale, but this time it did not disappear, it looked like the black and white scan. Weird!
• I found comments about cleaning the two little sensors at the start of the glass (see first image, below) but that seems associated with thin blue lines appearing on the scans, and does not appear to have made a difference.

The two little sensors I had to clean

Streaking on a colour scan

Same image, scanned in mono

Same image, scanned in colour at a different time - note how different the streaking is from the other colour scan


And then, below, a different strip, just to have more examples:

 

[koraks]

I'm sorry you're running into trouble with your scanner; very frustrating!

which the AI suggested might also be cause/exacerbated by light leakage

Which just goes to show how totally and utterly useless AI can be.

The streaking shown in the rather small examples seems to be RGB, so I see red, green and blue linear anomalies. My first guess would be that these are caused by a hardware defect in the actual sensor. So that would be a dead-end street and pretty much a one-way trip to the dumpster for this scanner.

Linear streaking in flatbed scanners is often caused by dirt on the calibration area, which is generally a narrow area at the start of the glass platen; film holders generally keep this area free and the scanner uses it to determine the minimum density. Dust etc. in this area will be included in the calibration for the scan, offsetting all color data acquired in that line. However, dust generally shows up as more or less neutral density, while in your case the linear defects are evidently colored and I suspect they have effectively a single pixel width. This is more consistent with a defect of the sensor itself. So bad news, I'm afraid.

You could try and dismantle the scanner and clean all glass surfaces, optics and (very, very carefully) perhaps even the sensor itself insofar as you can reach it without having to damage anything. But my first impression is that it's a long shot to try and fix this.

 

[peterB1966]

I'm sorry you're running into trouble with your scanner; very frustrating!


Which just goes to show how totally and utterly useless AI can be.

The streaking shown in the rather small examples seems to be RGB, so I see red, green and blue linear anomalies. My first guess would be that these are caused by a hardware defect in the actual sensor. So that would be a dead-end street and pretty much a one-way trip to the dumpster for this scanner.

Linear streaking in flatbed scanners is often caused by dirt on the calibration area, which is generally a narrow area at the start of the glass platen; film holders generally keep this area free and the scanner uses it to determine the minimum density. Dust etc. in this area will be included in the calibration for the scan, offsetting all color data acquired in that line. However, dust generally shows up as more or less neutral density, while in your case the linear defects are evidently colored and I suspect they have effectively a single pixel width. This is more consistent with a defect of the sensor itself. So bad news, I'm afraid.

You could try and dismantle the scanner and clean all glass surfaces, optics and (very, very carefully) perhaps even the sensor itself insofar as you can reach it without having to damage anything. But my first impression is that it's a long shot to try and fix this.

OOF! That is bleak... thanks for the reply.

 

[koraks]

Yeah, sorry about the bad news; this isn't looking good to me.

The photography on the other hand I like very much! I hope you'll share some of your work in the future here on the forum, or at least somewhere online!