Braun Slide Scan 4000 and alternatives

[jsmisc]

Having said that, I have now tried running a scan of the same slide in both VueScan and Dimage Scan.

I tried both at maximum resolution 16 bit and 16 times s&ling. ICE was on in Dimage Scan and infra red cleaning in VueScan was set at medium. I used more or less maximum settings in each just to see what would happen.

It was a difficult subject in that it involved white rabbit fur.

The VueScan scan took about a quarter of an hour. The Dimage Scan took about an hour. Both produced approx 200Mb files.

A huge difference in scanning times but there is no doubt that the Dimage Scan produced far more detail in the fur.

However I still have a great deal to learn about the settings in VueScan and maybe it is possible to alter them so as to produce the missing fur detail.

Here are the two s&les:

1.The Dimage Scan

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Giant white rabbit Dimage Scan
Giant-Rabbit-at-Kew-Dimage.html (0.5 k)</td></tr></table></center>

2. The VueScan

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Giant white rabbit VueScan
Giant-Rabbit-at-Kew-April-.html (0.5 k)</td></tr></table></center>

I hope this works as it is the first time I have tried it.

John

 

[dwa]

>What about fluid mount scanning with the Epson V750 flatbed. Has anyone tried it? If so is it worth the extra trouble, which by the way does not look like too much extra effort once one finds the mounting fluid and mounting film.

 

[jsmisc]

Here is another try

1.

2.

 

[mohican]

Marc, you wandered off a bit until the last paragraph when you finally nailed the point I'm trying to make:

"What has mistified me is why no one has mentioned using a digital camera on a copy stand to bring film frames into the digital domain. We used to copy slides this way all the time. It seems a well built copy stand with a Canon 5D full frame 12 meg RAW camera with the 1 to 1 L macro would make "scanning" a no brainer. Heck, you could do multiple shots of the same frame in seconds and seconds later HD merge them in PhotoShop for density options of incredible range."

That's exactly what I'm saying when I said that film scanner is nothing more than a glorified projector with digicam combined.

That's the type of product I actually need. I don't even care if it would not have multiple slide holders. If I can only do one frame at the time, but it would take 10 seconds per frame as opposed to 20 minutes - heck, I'll buy this kind of stuff! I have a friend that actually tried to implement something of this sort. His problem however was quite obvious - a do-it-yourself approach doesn't address quite a few issues (such as side-light exposure, focus adjustments, grain, having a really good diffused light and so on). A commercial-grade type of implementation would be better. Besides, no real camera is required - just literally a projector piece, lens, CCD or CMOS sensor, couple DSP chips and software to get the image off of it. That's it. No need to use real camera. Although I suppose in some ways using real camera could be handy. Imagine a unit that essentially contains everything but the CCD end of things and has a Canon or Nikon or even M-mount. Then all you do is attach your camera of choice to it and you got yourself "upgradeable" film scanner - as soon as you upgrade your camera you instantly upgraded your scanner resolution and features. And since you're familiar with your camera already - ease of use is obvious.

For 35mm when it comes to scanning there is nothing to it really, but manufacturers don't get it. I shoot 35mm exclusively. I have no use for any multi-format scanners, Imacons or otherwise. I'm not "missing" anything by not using medium format. If I was really missing something, I would have been using medium format already. And for my scanning needs there is nothing on the market. And I know dozens of people in same position and I'm sure there are actually tens of thousands.

Regarding the low volume market. Rangefinder is a low volume market and yet Zeiss came out with Ikon after investing quite a bit of time and money into R&D. R&D into developing decent optical system for scanner developed by say Sony with software done by SilverFast would take much less time and money, that's the beauty of partnerships.

By the way, I use one of those "professional" scanners of the years past - Kodak RFS 3570. In its day it was priced at $5000. If you ask me, it's not worth this kind of money and I use it with VueScan since Kodak hasn't provided any updates for it in years and nothing else works under Windows XP. This is once again an argument for creating glorified projector with digicam - even if support no longer exists, you can still pretty much use the same product without any issues.

Besides, professional's needs are very different from serious amateurs. Professional needs to make a living off of it. Amateur wants to enjoy it. What professional geeks like myself are using to do our jobs is the worst possible stuff to recommend to stay at home moms using their computers to read email from their grandma.


Regarding speed of scans it's the same story again - I'm a computer geek, I don't remember when was the last time I had a personal computer with less than 2GB RAM and CPU slower than 2GHz! This is not the issue - my computer is faster than any job I can throw at it. The whole process of scanning however is way too complicated for what it accomplishes for me. Why the heck do I need to waste time with calibration, curve adjustments, levels, unsharp masking and so forth when all I really need is quite literally a slide duplicator of digital variety!

Let's hope someone at Zeiss is reading this and we will see something of this sort within next 3 years.

Mike.

 

[jsmisc]

Well, you cannot see the differences in those pictures. How do you actually get pictures into the forum which are legivisible?

 

[zap]

Hi,

Actually what you ask for already exists (or rather: existed): a slide duplicating solution by using a digital camera! Check out the Nikon adapter ES-E28 that was made som 5-6 years back. I have one myself somewhere deep into a closet that I rarely use anymore (anyone interested? I can sell mine and a Nikon Coolpix 880 +wide/tele adapters for a good price . I believe it works for some later, more advanced models too.

The unit mounts onto the lens, and accepts negatives and slides in front of a diffused circular pane of acrylics that accepts light from behind. You set the camera on macro and shoot away. some 3-5 seconds per negative I'd say, a little more with slides. The backlight needs to be very good and even filling the frame, and WB calibrated for this source light in your camera. The quality is surprisingly OK for quick prints (and better/faster than using a mid-level flatbed), but of course it can't compare to the Nikon super Coolscan 4000 that I bought afterwards. The main feature with the unit is of course the speed by which you operate. I'd go through old BW rolls from the 80s that I never bothered making contact charts from, and found some gems in there in no time. Actually quite fun, since I would never bother do a regular scan of everything.

For serious film scanning the Nikon Coolscans are the way to go for scanning 35 mm film and slides in my mind, for one particular reason apart from quality issues (which are very high too):

the Nikon 35 mm scanners (some models only) are the only ones that accept multi-feed adapters for slides and negative film, at least as far as I know.

I regularly feed 30-40 CS-mounted slides (this mount I found to work best, others tend to jam up) into the Nikon SF-200 adapter or a whole uncut roll of BW/neg film into a different adapter, crank up all quality settings in Silverfast and leave my computer to do the work for the rest of the evening/night unattended. I don't even want to be near my computer during the process, for vibration purposes (and who enjoys staring at a 13 minutes scan taking place anyway?). Quality is just the same as for single-scans of course given that you have reasonably exposed original material, but occasional off-contrast subjects will benifit from a rescan with specific settings. The scanner software Vuescan, using the same scanner setup, also allows for multifeed scanning in RAW mode, although for my purposes the RAW format is just one step too much, since I don't do this for a living and have less time than I'd need. Anyway, with a RAW scan file, all information can be extracted for later interpretation: like a digital negative. Then there is no reason whatsoever to do individual scans. Since all settings are determined in each RAW scan conversion, all scans can be made the same.

These are just my views on scanning, but the feeders have helped me to continue enjoying shooting and using high quality film side by side with my digital camera, and still get a reasonable digital workflow without getting too frustrated over the length of a single high quality scan.

Greetings,

Richard

 

[fotografz]

I'll have to try the digital camera route with my bellows that has a slide copying attachment.

I seem to recall trying this a while back and it sucked, which is why I ended up with a scanner in the first place.

But maybe with a higher resolution camera it'll be better. Of course, the higher res digital camera cost 3X as much as a Nikon 5000 scanner ... LOL!

BTW, an Imacon 949, 5000 ppi, 16 bit scan of a 35mm frame produces a 250 meg file in ... get this ... 1 minute and 15 seconds !!!!

A 8000 ppi scan for a 500 meg 35mm portrait file takes a little longer ... 2.5 minutes : -)

6X6 scans in less than 2 minutes for a near 400 meg file. 4X5 takes a little over 2 minutes for 440 meg.

I can hardly select the next frame to scan before it's done.

What's really cool is doing the s&le film strip scan so fast it's like opening a digital camera file, then you can crop/cue them up in Flexcolor 50 deep if you want, hit scan and go eat dinner ... come back and they're done.

 

[jsmisc]

Gosh that scanning speed is wonderful Marc. what a difference that must make.

 

[jsmisc]

I think I finally worked out how to insert pictures at a reasonable size.
Here are the poor old monster rabbit pictures again but this time I hope, showing the difference in the fur with the two different scanning software's. Has anyone else noticed a difference in results between VueScan and Dimage Scan?
The top one is Dimage Scan.
I see you use VueScan Mike.

Richard,
That sounds a useful gadget. I think I found it on the web following your post but I cannot find it again now. I seem to remember many years ago that there was an automated slide duplicator available where you piled your slides in at one end and photographed them at the other. It may have been a Polaroid. I cannot find any reference to it on the web.

I always found slide copying with a traditional zoom copier difficult to do well

John