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BuonRotto
Not sayin', just sayin'
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2004-11-17, 14:13

My flatbed Epson 3170 has good negative and slide holders for its flatbed, and it actually does a good job with them. The software is kind of sucky, but the results are very good, especially if you take the time to ajust the color a bit yourself. It has photo restore algorithms that essentially take out some orange/red from the images and sift some colors cooler. It can overcompanesate sometimes, and sometimes the contrast is a bit high, but the results are good even if you don't tweak the settings. Like I said, the software is clumsy, and that's the main drawback.

For scanning prints, there's really not much point in maxing out your scanning dpi because the prints only have so much detail in them as a result of the film grain and the print grain. I wouldn't see a reason to go higher than 600 dpi for a print because anything more is just dividing the grain into pixels, adding a lot of file size and not picking up more detail.

If these are negatives or slides, then 3200 dpi, the max of this Epson does pretty well, though you can probably go a bit higher and pick up a little more detail, but the cost of sch a thing is much greater too. I have been scanning my film at 2400 dpi, roughly 5 Mp I think, and they look very good. You will see plenty of color variation (grain, speckles) when you zoom in close, color areas aren't as uniform as with a digital camera in most cases, but I think you'll find that prints up to 11 x 14 look really nice and sharp without seeing any of this color variation in the pixels.
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