If you don’t want to read all the way to the end, the quick answer is yes; the combination of Epson hardware and Silver-Fast software is good enough to support colour print work. However, to get there you have to turn on so many enhancement bells and whistles that the productivity falls off a cliff.
Today, not many small- to medium-sized printers can justify a full-time repro scanner. The boom in affordable, good quality digital cameras means most photographs arrive as digital files. The remaining level of film work might not justify a top-quality, high-productivity scanner, but you may still prefer something to hand rather than sending scanning out to a trade house. Typically, you’ll need quality and enlarging power that’s good enough for a wide-format inkjet, a colour copier, copier-printer or occasional four-colour offset.
Most printers also need something that fills the role of the old process or copy cameras, to digitise the odd bits of artwork and anything else that can’t be supplied as EPS or PDF files, such as old photographs or halftones for digitising, or bits of fabric or wood for pattern generation. A flatbed scanner can do this, but a dedicated film scanner can’t.
Quality gap
So you may find it convenient to use the same scanner for the occasional 35mm film strip or tranny. Until now, desktop flatbeds have been fine for photographic prints, which tend to be large format and low contrast, but haven’t had the image quality for colour film, particularly small 35mm trannies or negs. The better dedicated desktop film scanners can give acceptable quality, but can’t do reflection copy.
What we’re really testing is whether or not the Epson V750 can bridge that price and quality gap, to be a versatile all-rounder with “good-enough” quality for occasional small-format colour scanning.
The Perfection V750 Pro is the upmarket brother of Epson’s £340 V700 Pro. The hardware is nearly identical: both have a dual lens arrangement for resolutions up to 6,400x9,700dpi in the film-holding area, allowing very high optical enlargement ratios for 35mm film and smaller. Both have FireWire and USB 2.0 ports. A transparency illuminator is built into the hood. Rather flimsy feeling plastic holders are supplied for 4x35mm film strips, 12x35mm slides, 120/220mm film and 4x5in sheets.
The only hardware difference is that the V750 has a higher quality anti-reflection coating on its lens, intended to reduce flare (a significant quality-reducer on CCDs). Epson says the Dmax is 4.0. The dynamic range of CCDs is hard to verify, but ours did quite well at peering into dark shadow areas.
Special features
A copy of Epson’s own Scan software is supplied, but the V750 also comes with a copy of LaserFast’s SilverFast AI Studio tool (the 700 offers the “Lite” SE version). SilverFast is used by many desktop scanner makers to add professional controls to their higher-quality models. They add drivers and controls to suit special features of their own models.
SilverFast has very good automated exposure and focus controls, with plenty of manual overrides for more experienced operators. It supports batch work well, and can even be set up for simple automated workflows. It also allows you to set up multiple passes of the scan head, from two to 16. This oversampling helps eliminate random noise, but it slows down scanning dramatically. We settled on 4x scans as the best compromise. Even so, the sharpness didn’t match the Nikon CoolScan 5000 we used for comparison.
Also bundled with the V750 is X-Rite’s Monaco EZ Color ICC colour profiling software together with IT8 film and print calibration targets, costing £145 if bought separately.
Like many of the better desktop scanners, the V750 incorporates Kodak’s Digital ICE technology, an advanced system for automatic dust and scratch elimination that shines an infra-red beam onto the film during a separate pass of the head. Dust and scratches are illuminated so the software can identify them and then clone nearby pixels to delete them.
The Epson Digital ICE implementation did an excellent job, removing most unwanted marks on our old sample tranny, while preserving much of the detail. Other ICE options can reduce grain and colour fading.
Unfortunately, ICE really slows the scanning process, though it still saves a lot of time compared to spotting-out a poor original in Photoshop. It can be switched off in the SilverFast or Scan controls, as it may not be needed if you dust and clean the film in advance.
The slowing effect of the quality enhancements turns a fast scanner into a glacial performer. The basic scan speed is very fast – 58 seconds for a 4x5 film, 58 seconds for a 35mm at 500% and 19 seconds for a 10x8 print at 350dpi. With four-pass scanning, the time increases to three minutes and 48 seconds for 35mm enlarged to 500%. Switch on Digital ICE and the 500% 35mm 1x scan takes 2 minutes 53 seconds, but a 4x scan takes a yawning 21 minutes.
Both models can be fitted with an optional fluid mounting bed for an extra £50. This technique is used in high-end scanners to counter Newton’s rings, dust, scratches and film curl, but it hasn’t previously been offered with a desktop scanner. Epson UK is having trouble getting hold of these so we couldn’t try it out. The relative speeds and quality would have made an interesting comparison with Digital ICE.
Ten years ago, Heidelberg’s Linoscan models proved that the excellent Linocolor software, when added to fairly mundane desktop scanners, could give acceptable print quality. These were sold until Heidelberg got out of scanning in 2002. SilverFast software fulfils the same role with the improved Epson V750.
The V750 quality may not match the Imacon or iQsmart alternatives. However, it’s a good all-rounder with a film capability that’s acceptable for medium-quality print work, digital copier-printers or inkjets. But if you can spend more, a combination of an A3 flatbed plus a 35mm film scanner might give you an ideal combination of size and quality.
SPECIFICATIONS
Max resolution
• 6,400x9,700dpi (film area)
• 4,800x9,700dpi (reflection)
Scanning area
• 216x297mm (149x247mm when used with film holders)
Density range
• 4.0D
Price
• £465
Contact
• Epson UK 01442 261144 www.epson.co.uk
THE ALTERNATIVES
Kodak IQsmart
Introduced by Creo at Ipex 2002, this is the newest pre-press flatbed scanner on the market, with software for the latest Intel Macs and OS X. Its XYStitch scanning head allows maximum resolution at all points of the bed. IQsmart1 is mainly aimed at photographers and designers. IQSmart2 is fully repro-oriented and iQSmart3 has a higher resolution and dynamic range. A fluid mounting bed is a £1,300 option. Digital transparency files can be saved to preserve the full image content for archiving and repurposing.
Max resolution
• 4,300x8,200dpi (iQsmart2)
• 5,500x10,000dpi (iQsmart3)
Scanning area
• 305x457mm (330x457mm for copydot)
Density range
• 3.7-Dmax (iQsmart2)
• 3.9-Dmax (iQsmart3)
Colour depth
• 48-bits
Price
• £9,724 (iQsmart2)
• £14,980 (iQsmart3)
Contact
• CPS 01242 285100 www.cpsnet.co.uk
Imacon Flextight
Imacon’s Flextight scanners use a glassless ”virtual drum” where film is “flexed” into an arc and then rotated past a linear CCD scan head. So it won’t work with rigid artwork. The 949 has active cooling for the CCD. Autofeeders are optional for 949 and 848 models. The current FlexColor V4 software can also work with Hasselblad digital cameras. FlexTouch is optional dust and scratch-removal software.
Max resolution
• 80 to 8,000dpi (949, 848 models)
• 80 to 6,300dpi (646)
Density
• 4.6- to 4.9-Dmax depending on model
Colour depth
• up to 48-bit
Price
• £5,995 (646), £8,995 (848)
• £11,995 (949)
Contact
• Bodoni Systems 01895 825776 www.bodoni.co.uk
Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED
Top of Nikon’s 35mm range, this film-only kit accepts cut strips or uncut rolls of negatives or positives, 35mm slides or APS cassettes. It has Digital ICE and Nikon’s decent Capture tool. The quality is as good as you’ll get from a desktop scanner, though it slows down with multiple passes and ICE. Nikon also makes the £2,000 Super CoolScan 9000 ED for anything from 16mm microfilm to 4x5in cut sheets.
Max resolution
• up to 4,000dpi
Original sizes
• APS or 35mm film and mounted trannies
Density
• 4.8Dmax
Colour depth
• up to 48-bit
Price
• £800-plus
Contact
• Nikon UK 0845 4500 155 www.nikon.co.uk
