Re: filmscanners: Canon 4000 ppi film scanner

[Arthur Entlich <artistic@ampsc.com>]

Mark,

Thanks for the "review lite" ;-)

This is helpful info for all of us.  Many scanners (probably due to
software weaknesses, suffer in the neg scanning area, so the fact that
Canon seems to have gotten that part right is good news.

However, like you, deep shadows and some underexposed slides are my big
issues.  Having now looked over a number of scanners, I've gotten to
realize how important for me those shadow areas are.  I have some
otherwise perfectly good images that are only one or 1.5 stops
underexposed.  Most all of the info appears to be in the slide if I
project them with a brighter bulb setting.  It is really disappointing
when I go to scan these and find once the histogram or levels are
adjusted, what was the shadows are a bunch of mud or green haze.  Some
of this, I've recently ascertained is software coding and not
principally hardware, but either way, if you can't get the result, well...

Both the HP S-20 Photosmart (and more so it's earlier brother) and the
Minolta Dual II (at least the two I've had) suffer from this.  The HP
Photosmarts both simply could not bring the full shadows up keeping
their exposure ranges.  So there was a point where the information just
all went dark, and isn't to be found, even with lightening the image.

The Minolta has a lot more of that info there, but it is marred with
noise.  My two units varied widely in this area.  But I have seen some
scanners which seem to get right into those shadows and it is all there
for the brightening.  These are the ones for the slide shooter.  The
SS4000 is probably a good choice for that reason alone.

Art

Mark T. wrote:

 > 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
 >
 > .
 >