Andrew Dacey wrote:
>As well, I'd have the option to get the 9950 first and see if I really felt I
>was missing out on quality for the 35mm stuff.
>
>
That's what I'd do - if I didn't already have a 4000 dpi film scanner.
Another thing to consider is whether you actually want to scan at really
high dpi, particularly for older film and higher iso film. It might seem
that the only cost is some bigger clumps of grain, which can be
downsized and electronically minimized, if desired. However, considering
all the recent posts about storage issues, consider the size of the
files from these scanners.
My FS4000 produces scans about 5670x3780. At 3 colors and 16 bit,
uncompressed TIFF, that's about 120mb per scan. (Using VueScan "RAW"
output with IR data, that goes up to 160mb.) For 5400 dpi, the size of a
TIFF goes to about 230mb.
Of course, you can halve those sizes with 8-bit, but that throws away
all that great dynamic range you pay for in the scanner. You can also,
depending on software, reduce file size with lossless TIFF compression -
in theory, at least. My experience is that the compression adds lots of
time to file writing and reading, and in at least a couple of cases,
actually ended up with a slightly bigger file!
And that brings us to post processing. I have a 2.8gz p4 with 2gb of
RAM. Processing the images in PSCS is considerably slower than I would
like with these 120mb files. I suspect 230mb wouldn't bring the machine
to it's knees, but would bring me to mine. Maybe I've got something
wrong, but I've done all Adobe says to do with preferences, including
scratch file on a different disk than Windoze, controlling history,
etc.. Task Manager shows lots of disk and RAM available during some
lengthy operations, so I'm thinking I'm just simply processor bound with
some of the processing intensive tasks. Double the file size and it
will just get slower.
I'm not trying to be negative here, just pass on what I've learned in
going to a high res scanner.
There are things one can do, at least in VueScan, that I haven't tried
yet. One is to scan at full res and save at 1/4 size, so each 'box' of 4
original pixels becomes downsized to 1 pixel. In theory, this is
supposed to give better results than just scanning at half the
resolution, because of the way the scanner hardware works. Given what I
can do with 2048x3072 DSLR images, 1890x2835 film scan images should be
more than adequate for all but the most demanding uses of the best
original images. And some "experts" recommend scanning (virtually?) all
35mm film at 3200 dpi. Too many things to try out and learn about!
Moose
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