Compared to.

The question on most peoples minds will be, how does this scanner compare to a good film scanner or even another high end flatbed scanner such as the Epson 4990 or Canon 9950F. Well call me a hoarder or whatever, but I rarely delete files on my computer. I have looked through my folders and found some previous scans. The first scan is of my evening shot, the dedicated film scanner was the Nikon 4000 at its maximum resolution of 4000 dpi. I scanned the same transparency on the Epson V700 at 4000 dpi - this is an in between setting, it should have been 3200 or 4800 dpi. However, to keep the image size the same I used 4000 dpi.

Master shot
Epson V700 at 4000dpi	Nikon 4000 at 4000dpi
Canon 9950F at 4000dpi	Epson V700 at 4800dpi downsized to 4000
Epson	Nikon
Epson at 4800dpi	Epson at 6400dpi

Looking at the overall scan the Nikon produces the best looking scan, but the V700 is not far behind. The Canon 9950F is soft when compared to both Epson and Nikon - all images have had the same amount of USM applied in Photoshop. I also scanned in the shot at 4800dpi and downsized this to 4000dpi, but as you can see there was no real gain in doing this. The bottom two frames show how the Epson and Nikon pull out the shadow details, again there is very little difference and bearing in mind the Epson is working at 4000dpi its not a bad performance. Scanning with the Epson at 4800 produced a very good scan, although at 6400dpi the film becomes the limiting factor, there are too many pixels per film grain particle. The scanner is delivering more than sufficient quality at 4800dpi, but if you want to produce large prints the the 6400dpi may come in handy. My main critisim on the scans is they have flare on fine lines. I would expect the V750 with its Anti-Reflection Optical Coating on the CCD glass to eliminate or minimize this flare or ghosting.

Sweet spot.

The above scans were made with the transparency in the bottom left hand corner of the film holder - possibly not the best spot (Page 6 Normal preview). For the next set of scans I am going to move the slide to the centre column, second space down and see if this makes a difference to image quality.

Frame placed bottom left corner	Frame placed in the centre
Emulsion side facing down and flipped back	Film height adjusters removed

There is a small improvement, which is perhaps not very noticeable in the above crops. The transparency was placed emulsion side up, as per recommendation. For the bottom left frame I scanned the image with the emulsion side down and flipped the image back to the correct way in Photoshop, there is a slight improvement in image sharpness. For the last frame I removed the film height adjusters on the holder and re scanned the slide, this has resulted in a soft scan. I will fit the height adjusters back.