Any cheap & decent film scanner?

I looked at reviews on lots of gadgets like that before xmas. All were generally pretty poor. In the end i went for an epson V300 scanner which does negatives and slides as well as normal scanning.

I've been very impressed with the results and was thinking of doing a review on it for the forum sometime. It cost me £59 from ebuyer but prices seem to have gone up since december. It can do 6 negative frames at a time and from loading a strip of 4 with a strip of 2, scanning and starting to reload again takes 8 minutes using 2400 dpi scanning. At that setting you get an image file about 3Mb and around 3400 x 2200 pixels. It can be set to 12800 dpi if you want but takes a long time to scan!
 
They were all old family photo from past holidays so it is a bit hard to find ones suitable for posting!

Anyway here is a scan from a neg that has been laying around for about 20 years. Taken by my wife on a fairly ordinary compact camera at the time as I was in charge of the large brick of a video camera :) (and no that is not me in the shot but the camcorder size is similar!)

Resized to 600 pixels but not edited version -

img952small.jpg


Original file straight from the scanner with no adjustments at all.

http://www.argand.co.uk/pixs/TP/img952.jpg

The scan program does have dust removal settings but I have not tried them. can't see how it could work without losing detail somewhere.

I have tried the other scan settings and there is a marginal improvement in detail but even viewing on a 40" TV these scans at 2400 look fine.

As most of what I am scanning is for family memories and has been shot on a compact camera there is not much more detail to be had from the neg or needed for viewing.
 
Hope you like it too :)

I'd suggest you choose custom install for the software CD. By default it installs a few programs (Arcsoft something or other I think) I'll never use so I only selected the basic Epson stuff.

How good the scan looks depends on how good the original exposure was. well under exposed shots tend to be a bit noisy looking.... just like digital :)
 
Ok the scanner is here

First impressions - I like the black finish on it. Very smooth.

but the film holder looks a bit flimsy. Software looks good so far

sid

edit/ I'm finding that the dust removal option in the scan menu seems to do nothing? Any ideas as I'm having many issue with dust atm.
 
The film holder is a bit flimsy feeling. I've now scanned 3500+ frames and after a while I stopped being careful with it and just slapped it shut when the film was in about the right place. I can load it pretty quick now and it is still intact :)

I haven't had too many problems with dust. I clean the bed and the lid every couple of films and just blow the dust off any strips of film that look like they may be dusty.

I saw your other thread so glad you have it sorted anyway.
 
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