Epson Perfection 4990 Photo

...comes with a variety of epson photo album software, photoshop elements 2 and silverfast 6 SE. I tried out silverfast 6 having previously used silverfast Ai 5 with my old dedicated scanner and found it to be not as easy to get an acceptable scan. Epson's own software accomplishes the scan adequately and post scanning work can be left to photoshop. Epson's software does not allow specification of film beyond positive/negative/black and white. This ...
...from kodachrome 64 (notoriously difficult to scan). Digital ICE dust and scratch removal works well on small specks and background dust, less well on larger problems like fingerprints or thicker hairs. It was certainly a godsend when scanning some of my father's 30 year old slides. Bear in mind it makes the scanning process much slower if done at high resolution. At lower resolution it does not slow the process so much.

The film holders, ... more

I purchased this scanner for two purposes: the bulk scanning of my father's considerable collection of 35mm slides and for my own use scanning documents, 35mm and Medium Format slides and negatives.

For both tasks it has performed admirably. It has a range of scanning resolutions going up to 9600dpi (I think this is not "true" resolution but interpolation from 4800dpi and really anything much over this is a waste, the human eye cannot see the difference). I have regularly used it at resolutions from 300dpi to 4800dpi and found it to be excellent at all.

For scanning in bulk at a medium resolution you can expect 8 35mm frames to be finished in approximately 5 minutes. At 4800dpi this is more like 10-15 minutes.

A full resolution scan of a slide can be breathtaking. The high dynamic range of this scanner means TIFFs come straight from the scan with excellent rich tones and blacks are real, not a result of lower dynamic range cut-offs on some other scanners.

The scanner comes with a variety of epson photo album software, photoshop elements 2 and silverfast 6 SE. I tried out silverfast 6 having previously used silverfast Ai 5 with my old dedicated scanner and found it to be not as easy to get an acceptable scan. Epson's own software accomplishes the scan adequately and post scanning work can be left to photoshop. Epson's software does not allow specification of film beyond positive/negative/black and white. This can be an issue although I got excellent quality scans from kodachrome 64 (notoriously difficult to scan). Digital ICE dust and scratch removal works well on small specks and background dust, less well on larger problems like fingerprints or thicker hairs. It was certainly a godsend when scanning some of my father's 30 year old slides. Bear in mind it makes the scanning process much slower if done at high resolution. At lower resolution it does not slow the process so much.

The film holders, and white background for when scanning paper etc, are sturdy and easy to clean (very important), the glass too is easily cleaned and does not hold dust.

Because of the large amount of colour and tonal information captured by this scanner, file sizes are large. A 4800dpi colour 35mm frame will be approximately 70mb after scanning. A 4800dpi colour Medium format frame is approximately 400mb. A large format frame must be closer to a gigabyte although to get the most out of larger format film drum scanning is a better route than desktop scanning.

Its nearest rival is the Canoscan 9950F which has the advantage of being able to scan 12 35mm frames at once and apparently faster dust removal technology.

Very occasionally the scanner will completely fail to scan a frame or will only partially scan. This is annoying if you have simply left it to scan without necessarily checking and find you must re-scan but it is mercifully not a common occurrence.

I found I had to plug this scanner in to its own socket in the wall as it was sometimes not starting up correctly when plugged into a powerbar (My PC uses a 480W power supply) so be aware of this too.

For me the explicitly labelled Dmax of 4 compared to Canon's reluctance to divulge this information (though allegedly it is around 3.8) was enough to swing it for me and I have not been disappointed. 

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