V850 scans look terrible compared to digitized with camera; scanner just too old?

JWMster · May 21, 2024

Alan: These look great. Dry of fluid scans? They look like the latter to me.

dokko · May 21, 2024

I agree that the V850 makes for very nice 35mm scans unless you want to print huge. I used one for years and found it nicer in texture and color over Frontier/Noitsu scans.
Silverfast helps a lot with getting nice colors (although you pay for it not only with money but by using a horrible interface).
for B/W, it feels a bit soft, but they still hold up very nicely up to 20x25" prints.

camera scanning can give you higher resolution, but colors are tricky, grain structure can get mangled, and you don't get the benefit of ICE for color films.

Hassasin · May 21, 2024

Alan Edward Klein said:
Here's my results with Tmax 100 35mm within a V850. I had to sharpen the heck out of it in post. But you get fairly decent results. I haven't printed these., so there's that.

Looks pretty good. I was only saying the V850 can do a decent job with 35mm, as long as expectations are reduced to match its limitations. OP was making comments suggestive of basically "is it so bad by design?" and that is simply not the case. User error were the likely cause, and possibly some defect in the machine, or both.

Alan Edward Klein · May 21, 2024

JWMster said:
Alan: These look great. Dry of fluid scans? They look like the latter to me.

Dry. Another thing is that I checked the height of each of the film holders and selected the best height for best focus. Then I marked that setting with a Magic Marker so I always use the same height. The V850 holders come with this height adjustment feature.

Alan Edward Klein · May 21, 2024

dokko said:
I agree that the V850 makes for very nice 35mm scans unless you want to print huge. I used one for years and found it nicer in texture and color over Frontier/Noitsu scans.
Silverfast helps a lot with getting nice colors (although you pay for it not only with money but by using a horrible interface).
for B/W, it feels a bit soft, but they still hold up very nicely up to 20x25" prints.

camera scanning can give you higher resolution, but colors are tricky, grain structure can get mangled, and you don't get the benefit of ICE for color films.

I believe you meant to say that ICE doesn't work with BW film. It works with color negative and color positive film, except Kodachrome. ICE also works with photo prints.

The V850 also has a Dust Removal setting in addition to ICE. But I've never used it and don;t know how it works. Maybe someone else can explain.

loccdor · May 21, 2024

Hassasin said:
V850 does a decent job on 35mm, but it is not made to give great results for obvious reasons. But still, scans are quite OK for the small format and pretty good quality prints can be made to 8x10 even 11x14 with some care.

For me 11x14 would be pushing it a little on images where fine detail is important. 10 inches is the 35mm printing limit of the Epson flatbeds in my opinion.

dokko · May 21, 2024

Alan Edward Klein said:
I believe you meant to say that ICE doesn't work with BW film. It works with color negative and color positive film, except Kodachrome. ICE also works with photo prints.

what I meant is that we loose ICE with camera scanning.
apologies for the poorly worded sentence.

Alan Edward Klein · May 22, 2024

dokko said:
what I meant is that we loose ICE with camera scanning.
apologies for the poorly worded sentence.

Actually it was my mistake., You did say camera scanning.

V850 scans look terrible compared to digitized with camera; scanner just too old?

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