BANME.sh posted:

I found 2400 is a nice sweet spot for 35mm

ansel autisms posted:

Keep on.

Wild EEPROM posted:

I am looking at scanners for scanning 6x7 negatives.

Originally I was looking at the Epson V600, but I noticed that the V550 existed and was on sale; V600 being right around $200 and claiming to offer 6400x9600 dpi resolution, while the V550 is right around $150 and claims to offer 6400dpi resolution.

Are those changes worth the additional 50 bucks, or are there other things that would be worth it? Or should I just buy the 550 and spend the other 50 bucks on whatever crack or film or whatever it is kids spend money on these days

BANME.sh posted:

I hate everything except epson scan. Turn off all the auto settings and do your corrections in photoshop.

Bhodi posted:

I'm jumping to the end of the thread, so apologies. I seem to be in the same boat as many of you, I've got a packing box full of old family photos and a few negatives that I want to scan for the folks before they get any worse.

I've got a budget of about $3-500. Just to confirm, Epson is the way to go, using EpsonScan, into RAW or some lossless format that you then manipulate/color balance/restore in photoshop?

I glanced at epson's website, and the V600 is $200 and the V700 is $650, so I'm probably going with the V600 unless there's a significant need for the extra price (It appears to do interpolation with two separate scanners?) Does it come with EpsonScan software?

MrBlandAverage posted:

Both scanners come with Epson Scan. The V700 has a larger backlit area, so it can scan more negatives/transparencies at once. The V700 also has a higher maximum effective resolution (ignore the bullshit garbage interpolated maximum resolution numbers that are advertised).

Man_of_Teflon posted:

If you're patient, V700 refurbs show up once in blue moon on the Epson store website for $415 with a 1 year warranty.

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

I have nothing to add, I just wanted to point out that, as of tonight, after 4 long years of on-and-off I work I have finally finished scanning all prints at my parents' house. That is 4,647 prints (not counting the several hundred duplicates I set aside and didn't scan) scanned, geotagged, descriptive-tagged, and people-tagged.

I am, however, at only 8,095 negatives scanned with maybe 5,000-7,000 left.

TheLastManStanding posted:

That looks more like some extraordinarily bad sharpening filter than ICE. I've never encountered that type of artifact and I always scan color film with ICE turned on.

Frobbe posted:

I've been tasked with finding a film/dias/slide scanner for our archive at work. I am thinking something in the Epson range, so they can scan a lot of slides at a time, or a Plustek scanner, for size and possibly ease of use. recommend me a scanner. I haven't asked archives about their budget yet, but i'm fairly sure they're of a "buy once, buy good" mentality.

Chill Callahan posted:

Are the slides mounted?

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

On the one hand, it sucks when you're cleaning a negative to scan and it's been improperly stored for so long and so degraded that it wipes part of the exposure right off when you clean it.

On the other hand, sometimes you get results like this, in which a smoking orb of nothing grows over US 1 and a Lovecraftian horror prepares to lurch out and incinerate the lucky first

Rev. Bleech_ posted:

quote:

Gentleman , Let me shed some light on the whole Pakon ordeal since we are a dealer and also a repair center for them.

We are the original Pakon resellers before Pakon sold the company to Kodak a few years back, back then Pakon inc only sold them directly or thru us, to this day we still talk to the export president who has moved to the country of Colombia to Perdue other interest.

After that there were no more manufacturing of any Pakon scanner, kodak took the template or mold for the 135 and kept it for the Kodak Apex system exclusively to not sale it as a stand alone .

We where selling some restored units that we had in stock for around $1900 each, The original price for the scanner was around $7.000 when new, and it was selling well back when film was still in play.

Then AAA Stumble upon a few scanners, say around 100 of them from a pharmacy chain ,they got them for free because it came in a shipment of scrap machines, and so they flooded the market for $350 and $450 price until they ran out, now the price is going back to its original mark, although not $1900 but around $1000, somehow demand in many countries as well as on the US is picking up, we don't have an explanation for that but we sell our products in around 112 countries and we are seeing Pakon request from many of them on a daily basis from Australia to Nigeria , there is only a handful of scanner left in the US for sale and after that runs out I will assume they will become very scarce and very hard to find so prize will probably go back up around $2000 a piece , we ourselves only have a few units and we don't anticipate having any more in the future for now although we will be getting some 235's which was the most popular model because it's faster.

F235 go for around $1800 a piece, ( restored , NOT used ), there are some used ones on the Internet but they have issues and repair on all Pakon scanners cost around $1.000 + because parts for them are no longer being manufactured so we have to rely on used ones to scrap or simply repairing parts which requires expert tech labor and man-hours, so next time your scanners break down now you know what you are going to have to deal with.
Best of luck for everyone.
Regards,
Tech staff.

TheJeffers posted:

I got the Epson fluid mounting accessory for the V700 as a Christmas gift. While I'm happy to have it, Epson seems to know that this is a niche product for the utterly insane, and doesn't even bother to try and make a complete kit out of it. The $60 price tag is deceptive, because you will need to go out and find some supplies more commonly associated with drum scanners to actually use the thing.

Aztek sells both the mounting fluid you need and the potentially-a-monster-rip-off "optical grade" Mylar sheets that you use to seal your slides or negatives to the glass mounting tray. 100 9"x11" sheets of this magical Mylar are $80, and a liter of the KAMI mounting fluid that most people seem to recommend is another $45. I'm pretty sure that both of those consumables will last forever for a home user, but I'm still wavering on purchasing either because the cost is ridiculous given the maybe 5% increase in scan quality.

If anybody else has played with this mounting system, and can point me to some cheaper supplies, I'm all ears. I'll probably just take the $125 hit because I want to see what this thing can do, but jeez.

Pompous Rhombus posted:

You shoulda posted here first dude! I had a spare one (work gave me all their old v700 holders when I quit a few years ago), I would have given it to you for shipping.

alkanphel posted:

I'm not sure if all that effort is really worth the extremely marginal increase in detail. You might be better off looking for a Minolta Dimage or Nikon Coolscan 9000 if you need all that extra image quality.

TheJeffers posted:

It's probably not, but I have the thing now, so I figured I might as well try it out. I don't really need the extra IQ, but I don't strictly need to be shooting film or laboring over scans, either, so it all kind of washes out.

Given the expense and labor involved, I'll probably wait until I have a shot in the bag that justifies this sort of effort. The stock V700 120 holders are fine for sharing stuff here and on Flickr.

alkanphel posted:

Yeah but the extra effort is really too much (for me). The V700 Betterscanning holders work well enough for me to print out to 24x24" which is pretty drat big to me already.