Epson 3200 review

The Epson Perfection 3200 scanner

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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.

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 3200 has a maximum optical resolution of 3200, 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 two extra controls, the Unsharp Mask Filter and the Descreen Filter. 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.

In Professional Mode a 10 x 8 photograph was previewed in six seconds, the full scan took 17 seconds and produced a 23.1mb file. This are the same times as in Home Mode. Applying a 133 lpi Descreen to the image added an extra 13 seconds to the timings (still very fast)

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 deliver excellent results.

SilverFast 6 has more options than the Epson Scan, Professional Mode, I will look at this software later in the review.

On Thursday 13th I will look at the hardware in more detail, including the three film holders. I will also publish some scans.