RE: filmscanners: Canon 4000 ppi film scanner

["Alex Zabrovsky" <alexz@zoran.co.il>]

Mark, I would appreciate your work on that issue.
In case you only would like to share your opinion off-list, please don't
forget me... :-)

Regards,
Alex Z

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
[mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of Mark T.
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 4:28 PM
To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
Subject: Re: filmscanners: Canon 4000 ppi film scanner


I'll be posting a more full (if not necessarily more professional!) report
than this as soon as I get a few spare moments..
But in the meantime, my one-hour lunchtime play with the Canon FS4000US
revealed that:

- It's a pretty good scanner with nice optics and good depth of field, and
does *really* nice work on negatives
- FARE is quite effective, and though I have not used ICE/dICE, it appears
to give very acceptable results
- It has what appears to be an impressive dynamic range, but... :-(
- the catch..?  - It suffers from noise, or at least this sample did...

In dark areas of slides a lot of that dynamic range is marred by
noise.  Admittedly it is 'nice' noise (?), ie it's very fine, very even,
and not streaky, but it means that for a person like me who uses
transparencies mostly, and has a bad habit of underexposing them, this
isn't the 4000 dpi scanner for me.  (And no, I don't think this noise is
grain or grain aliasing - I know what that stuff looks like :-), and the
slides were K25's..)

I currently have an Acer 2720 (one from a good batch!), and it is
definitely better in the 'shadowy realms' .  Not because it sees more
shadow detail - the Canon beats the Acer by a very small margin here, BUT
if you wind the brightness/gamma up, the Acer's shadows stay smooth well
beyond the point at which the Canon goes *quite* noisy...  Note that we
*are* talking fairly deep shadows here, so for well-exposed images I am
sure you would be very happy with the results - but for my style of
photography, I need that dark stuff!

Ah well..

On negatives however, it looked very nice, and produced superb colours, esp
from Reala, without even touching the settings..  I didn't have time to
give it a good workout on overexposed negatives to see if the noise showed
up much there.

I'll post a fuller report soon, and if anyone wants samples I'll stick a
couple of snippets on the web somewhere..

mt

Art wrote:
>I think the new Canon arrived on the scene at the wrong time..
snip