Hacker News Reader

Comment by sys32768 | Hacker News Reader

I spent months scanning about 2500 family negatives and slides on an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner.

While it's no FlexTight, I am happy with the results, especially because I had no plans to crop.

In hindsight, I wished I had used SilverFast rather than the Epson scanning software. SilverFast offers Multi-Exposure which does two scans for maximum dynamic range and then merges them into one.

Also, the Epson default film holders have no ability to flatten the film strips so I probably ended up with softer images in many cases. I believe there are 3rd party adapters that address this.

View on HN

The V600 is better than most and has a CCD sensor instead of an inferior CIS, but the limiting factor is the optics. The V700/V750/V800/V850 have proper lenses.

The old-school way to scan film is to lay the film directly on glass with a thin layer of mineral oil. Works terrific for medium and large format. We used to do this for drum scanners.

https://www.analogfilm.camera/scanning/deciding-when-to-wet-...

I also use an Epson Perfection (V750 Photo). These machines produce very good results if you are careful with film positioning. I still haven't figured out a way to scan really old negatives in rolls: despite buying several magic holders, I've yet to find one that can oppose the force of a nearly 80-year old film roll.

I would not recommend third-party software, though. The problem with scanner software is that every developer seems to think that I have unlimited time to tweak the settings for every scan, and that scanning those 5 negatives is my only job for the next month. That might be the case for some people, but trust me, if you're looking at several thousand scans, you do not want to tweak each one individually. You want software that works with you. And so far every third party program I tried did not have this approach.

I have the same scanner. Would you mind sharing your setup? I've only used mine for flat-bed document scanning, but do have a bunch of old family slides.

Do you have the illuminated back? If so, your cover is maybe 4" (10cm) thick.

I have the v750 and scan medium and large format film with excellent results. You can buy Viewscan software from https://www.hamrick.com, made by a NASA JPL engineer, if I remember correctly.

You get a perpetual license (I reinstalled after 12 years and the updated software ran on my old license code). The software can pull detail out of even the worst negative. I cannot recommend this highly enough! I do have SilverFast as well, and have tried the Mac-native scanning, but Viewscan is the best.

If you have slides and you haven't kept the original film adapters, you can find them on ebay or even Amazon. They are simple plastic holders, nothing special.

You can usually select a particular film type if you scan color negatives that will automatically color correct for the film quirks. All in all, a very easy process once you get set up.

Hope this helps!

You're lucky that you have a perpetual license. They recently switched to only one year of updates.

I'm flabbergasted, yeah, it does seem to have the illuminated back. I never looked far enough to see that the mat covering the inside of the lid was removable. I don't recall film holders at all, but will definitely have to look into getting some.

I bought this thing when we moved, to get set up ASAP for a remote home office, so documents and some photos have always been the purpose. I had taken the slides in a box to a photo place, where they used some setup with a DSLR to get JPEGs, but now I'll need to dig the box back out. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com