More 35mm and extras. UPDATED 13/02/2005

Before moving on to large format scanning I want to quickly look at some of the extra features in the scanner interface. The new version of Digital ICE offers two choices; Standard and High, the catch is that this is only for reflective scanning, the choice for film is either On or Off. See samples below. Another feature, which is on older versions of Epson Scan, is colour restoration. Click on the button and presto as if by magic, the image recovers its lost colours. I had to dig around in my files to find something dusty and faded to test the 4990 with. I apologize for the less than creative photography, this is a shot I took when I was 16.

Straight scan	Scan with Colour Restoration
No ICE	With ICE

The shot used for the Digital ICE sample is a time consuming one to correct, it would have taken hours of cloning to completely clean. The image was scanned in at 2400dpi and took 1min 7seconds, with Digital ICE it took 6 minutes 15 seconds.

After thoughts with 35mm

Before I move on with the rest of the review. I have been doing some thinking and experiments and I have come up with some thoughts. I scanned in my crane shot at 2400dpi and resampled the image to 4800dpi in Photoshop. There isn't much difference in sharpness, although the 2400dpi seems to have gained "Halos" around the girders.

Scanned at 2400dpi and resampled to 4800dpi using Photoshop (Bicubic Sharper), USM applied

Scanned at 4800dpi, USM applied

Batch scanning

The 4990 only allows for 8 mounted transparencies to be scanned at any one time, I batch scanned a set of eight slides at 2400dpi producing a 18.5mb file for each scan. The total scan time was 8 minutes 48 seconds. You should be aware that not all applications will allow multiple scans, Photoshop does. I used the thumbnail mode for this, in the process I discovered that Epson Scan doesn't like certain types of slide mounts, see left image below. The thumbnail previews read the slide as image content from the white area inwards, whereas on the all white mount the image was read from the correct position. This explains why sometimes Epson Scan produced some odd crops, I guess you can automate things up to a point, but it is still nice to have the last word.

Older mounts such as this can produce odd previews	All white GePe mounts are not a problem

I was a bit disappointed in that the 4990 would only allow 8 slides to be scanned, the Canon 9950F lets you scan 12 frames. Although using the 35mm strip holder you can scan 24 frames, it isn't much use for mounted slide collections. A solution is to use the Film area Guide and you can now place 20 mounted slides. This method will not generate thumbnails, just an overall view of the entire document plate, you have to define a crop for each slide. Picking up the slides afterwards can leave a hefty dose of fingerprints on the glass surface, a suggestion is to use a stiff piece of paper or card and scoop up the slides.

20 mounted 35mm slides can be scanned, but you have to manually define each slide
A card scoop will save lots of fingerprints on the glass

B/W and colour neg scanning

The 35mm strip holder was used for this section. 35mm film is held in position by two clips at one end of the holder, this is sufficient to stop the film moving about. The instructions also tell you to place the film emulsion side up - so I have. As with mounted transparencies you have two options, Thumbnail mode or Normal mode. I like the thumbnail mode as it lets you preview and rotate each frame instantly, in Normal mode you have to make a selection and then zoom in to the frame, this can be tiresome for all 24 images.

12 of 24 frames in Thumbnail mode	All 24 frames in Normal mode

The b/w film was scanned using 8 bit Greyscale (Grayscale to those over the pond) and the images were on par with the transparency scans, i.e. they were no worse and no better. The quality of tonal values is as expected and you could improve on them in Photoshop (or Elements). I also tried the 16 bit scan mode and to my eyes this offered no advantage, looking at the histogram values there was an insignificant difference (mean values = 125.89 in 8bit and 126.06 in 16 bit with a deviation of .15). Ilford FP4 film was used.

8 Bit scan	16 bit scan

Another feature in the Epson scan is the Grain reduction option. This has three settings; Low, Medium and High. In my test I found that the focus was shifted in three stages, at the high setting this was almost like applying a small amount of Blur. My advice, forget this option. All the images below have had USM applied in Photoshop

No Grain reduction	Grain reduction set to Low
Grain reduction set to Medium	Grain reduction set to High

On the photo-i forum Tariq asked me why I used Bicubic Sharper in Photoshop for resampling the crane shot. I tried each method; Bicubic, Bicubic Smoother and Bicubic Sharper, and the difference wasn't even visible, I did get the hunch that Bicubic Sharper was producing the better result. Here are the results. (Look at the No Grain Reduction picture above for the 4800dpi scan)

2400dpi original scan	Resampled to 4800dpi using Bicubic
Resampled to 4800dpi using Bicubic Smoother	Resampled to 4800dpi using Bicubic Sharper

Colour negatives produced similar results in sharpness terms, colour wise the Epson Scan does a good job at maintaining colour accuracy. Images can be altered to taste.

I mentioned earlier in this review that the Film Area Guide mask would accommodate a 10x8 sheet film and said this would be a useful feature if you wanted to contact proof an entire roll of 36 exposure 35mm film (six strips of six exposures) I have tried this and yes it works. Use the settingsin the screen grab if you want to do the same. I used a 10x8 glass sheet on the top of the negatives to keep the film flat, you may want to adapt an old Paterson contact print frame - I sold my one last year.

Preview an entire roll of film	Scan in ready to print
The above settings will be more than sufficient for a 10x8 contact print (4.39mb file)

Medium and Large format next