Digital BW, The Print

On Thursday, August 9, 2001, at 10:14  AM, antonisphoto@... wrote:
> can you tell us more about the real world performance with negs.
> How do plugged up highlight areas (darkest on the neg) scan in terms of
> detail and noise?

I'm very happy with it so far -- a week into owning it.  I'd previously 
used a UMAX PowerLook II (nearly three years old), and the Epson is 
*far* better with highlights.  I found this with some B&W shots I did 
recently of friends of mine at the beach (in Seattle).  The day was 
quite bright, and I did a bad job at remembering to stop down the 
lens. ;)  Scanning on the UMAX, the negs were nearly unusable (at least 
the sky portion); on the Epson, they were very good.

Now, this is only my relative opinion, from only using a pretty bad (by 
today's standards) UMAX previously.

I uploaded one of the raw images, straight in from the scanner 
(converted to TIFF in PhotoShop).  I think I used the default 
auto-levels in the scanner software -- not something I usually do, but I 
find it's actually not so bad on this scanner.  Note that this is an 8mb 
file, scanned at 800dpi at 16bits.  I tried to make it a 
reasonably-sized JPEG, but doing so destroyed all the details that I'm 
talking about.  But if you're truly interested, take a look:

	http://www.meer.net/~johnl/010717a.04.tif

(I shouldn't have to mention that this is only for reference -- please 
don't do anything else with this file.)

> Have you compared to any high-end scanner?

I haven't.  I'm considering splurging for an Imacon scan, but haven't 
yet gotten around to it.

> Since you mentioned color negs (off topic here, but...) does the 
> interface have
> profiles or transforms for different color neg films?

Its idea of profiles seems a bit wacked -- seems to prefer to tag it 
with an *output* profile, rather than a scanner profile.

On the other hand, the Pro model (and maybe a few of the other 
variations) comes with both SilverFast & Monaco EZcolor (and a printed 
IT-8 target).  An acquaintance had reasonable luck making a 
scanner-based profile and applying that in PhotoShop (obviously turned 
off the tagging in the Epson scanner driver), and that worked well.  I 
haven't yet tried it.

john