Real world scanning

VueScan is a stand alone application but will export files directly into your imaging application, I would have liked a Twain compliant version just to keep my workflow tighter, in actual use I didn't mind it being a background application, at least you don't have to shut it down each time you want to get on with editing. VueScan is packed with features, the latest version 8.2.03 also includes OCR (optical character recognition), write to PDF file and DNG support. Although it doesn't have Digital ICE or FARE, VueScan has its own Infrared clean tool. Using the Epson 4870 scanner I tried a transparency at the three settings on offer; Light, Medium and Heavy and here are the results.

Original dusty 35mm slide
No Infrared	No Infrared
Infrared set to Light	Infrared set to Light
Infrared set to Medium	Infrared set to Medium
Infrared set to Heavy	Infrared set to Heavy

The quality and sharpness of scans was seriously affected by VueScans Infrared Clean, this feature does need some looking at or removing from the interface. I was concerned about this as the print scans were looking very good. So I rigged up the Canon 9950F scanner and ran the same tests, keeping the slide in approximately the same place on the glass plate. Although the dust removal worked better, the actual image quality was still seriously flawed. Another problem which came to light was excessive noise in the shadow areas. I used the multi pass option (set to 3) to see if the noise could be reduced - it was, but the image quality was totally unacceptable.

Canon ScanGear + Medium Dust removal	Canon ScanGear + Medium Dust removal
VueScan + Infrared Medium Dust	VueScan + Infrared Medium Dust
VueScan + Infrared Medium Dust at 3 Passes	VueScan + Infrared Medium Dust at 3 Passes
CanoScan Noise	VueScan Noise

At the start of this review I was very impressed with VueScan, especially on printed photographs. For film users my own findings indicate that the software has a way to go before it can match the quality on offer from both ScanGear and EpsonScan.

For normal scanning, the scan times are a lot slower than those using EpsonScan software, using the 4870 set to 4800dpi Epson scan took 2 min 03 seconds to produce a 96mb file, VueScan took 3 min 47 seconds to do the same. Previews were also slower.