I've had an Epson V550 for a few years that I use to scan my 35mm and 120 negatives for sharing on social media. I was pretty happy with the quality of the scans for a long time, but then one day I decided to upgrade the OS on my Macbook Pro to Catalina, which mandated an update to EpsonScan2 and a new Scanner Driver. After those updates, the quality of my scans took a nosedive. The scans were very fuzzy and no amount of tweaking either in the scanner software or Lightroom seemed to sufficiently help. I tried Silverfast in place of EpsonScan in case the updated Epson software was inferior to the old version but the scan quality remained poor.
I searched around online for a solution but didn't find one so I just decided to live with the inferior scans as they were 'good enough' for posting on Instagram. But I recently decided to self-publish a small book/zine of my work to distribute to family and friends and the scans I made after the software upgrade were just too poor for print.
I decided to look once again for a solution. I looked on Epson's web site to see if there was any way to install the old version of the scanner software on Catalina but didn't find one. But I did notice that Epson had recently released a new version of EpsonScan2 and the Catalina scanner driver in mid-October so I decided to install it to see if there had been any improvements in scan quality. Well, I was blown away when comparing a scan of one of my 35mm negatives made with the previous version of the Epson software for Catalina and the latest one. The new scan is dramatically better with way better sharpness.
I've attached two raw scans to illustrate the difference. These are right out of the scanner, converted from TIFF to JPG, with no other post-processing applied.
Scanned with previous version of EpsonScan2/Catalina Driver
Scanned with latest version of EpsonScan2/Catalina Driver
If you've got an Epson V550 scanner, running Catalina on your Mac, and have been struggling with lousy scan quality, you'll definitely want to upgrade to the latest version of EpsonScan and the scanner driver for Catalina. It doesn't turn the little flatbed scanner into a drum scanner
but the improvement in scan quality is significant.
I searched around online for a solution but didn't find one so I just decided to live with the inferior scans as they were 'good enough' for posting on Instagram. But I recently decided to self-publish a small book/zine of my work to distribute to family and friends and the scans I made after the software upgrade were just too poor for print.
I decided to look once again for a solution. I looked on Epson's web site to see if there was any way to install the old version of the scanner software on Catalina but didn't find one. But I did notice that Epson had recently released a new version of EpsonScan2 and the Catalina scanner driver in mid-October so I decided to install it to see if there had been any improvements in scan quality. Well, I was blown away when comparing a scan of one of my 35mm negatives made with the previous version of the Epson software for Catalina and the latest one. The new scan is dramatically better with way better sharpness.
I've attached two raw scans to illustrate the difference. These are right out of the scanner, converted from TIFF to JPG, with no other post-processing applied.
Scanned with previous version of EpsonScan2/Catalina Driver
Scanned with latest version of EpsonScan2/Catalina Driver
If you've got an Epson V550 scanner, running Catalina on your Mac, and have been struggling with lousy scan quality, you'll definitely want to upgrade to the latest version of EpsonScan and the scanner driver for Catalina. It doesn't turn the little flatbed scanner into a drum scanner
but the improvement in scan quality is significant.