Epson 4990

Epson Scan.....continued

Professional Mode - the last mode is intended for the advanced worker. The choices from the Home mode have been expanded to give finer control on the final scan. The professional mode interface is the same as on the 4870, I am most impressed at the speed which this works. Any adjustments are updated in the preview window almost instantly.

Professional Mode in Epson Scan

The scan screen is now divided into separate categories
Settings, at the moment there is only one choice called Current Settings, but once you have made a set of adjustments you can save your settings by typing in a name and then press the save button.
Original, select Reflective or Transparency in the Document type. If you select Reflective then two other options are available, Document Source (choice of Document Table or ADF, the ADF will not appear if there isn't an Automatic Document Feeder connected) and Auto Exposure Type (Photo or Document). If you selected Transparency then a film drop down list appears with, Positive Film, Colour Negative Film and B&W Film choices. I will be covering film scanning in great detail later in the review.
Destination, from the drop down list select the Image Type 48 bit colour, 24 bit colour, colour smoothing, 16 bit greyscale, 8 bit greyscale, halftone and B&W. Note that not all applications will be able to work with 48 bit colour and 16 bit greyscale images - Photoshop can.
Scanning Quality can be set to Best or Draft. In draft mode there will be some loss of quality.
Resolution can be set from 50 to 12800dpi, note that the Epson 4870 has a maximum optical resolution of 4800, the software interpolates the file to achieve the higher dpi. Target Size enables you to set the size for your final scan.


Original document settings	Destination choices

Adjustments, this is where the image can be tweaked before scanning. Epson provide a good selection of tools, Histogram with levels adjustment and there is a Grey Balance intensity slider for correcting any cast that may be visible in a grey area. The Tone Correction is similar to curves in Photoshop. The last palette is Image Adjustment, use this to globally alter Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and colours.


Histogram Adjustment	Tone Correction	Image Adjustment

Lastly there are three extra controls, Unsharp Mask Filter, Descreen Filter. Colour Restoration and Dust removal - DIGITAL ICE. The USM filter offers three levels, Low, Medium and High. The Descreen filter has four settings, General, Newspaper 75 lpi, Magazine 133 lpi and Fine prints 175 lpi. I will test these later. The colour restoration does a quick fix on the image, there isn't any user control other than on or off. Lastly Digital Ice, I will put this through its paces later in the review.

In Professional Mode a 10 x 8 photograph was previewed in 6.25 seconds, the full scan took 13.43 seconds and produced a 20.6mb file. These times are slightly faster than with the 4870 scanner.

The Epson Scan although an easy to use interface, does lack sophisticated control. The Unsharp Mask Filter is far too basic for a scanner of this caliber. The other controls are more than sufficient to produce superb scans, indeed the first test scans are looking very good. I always scan images without making any adjustment in the scanner software, I prefer to do my manipulation work in Photoshop or other application. However, unless your an absolute perfectionist the Home and Professional Modes will both deliver excellent results.