[Martyn]

Hi, guys.

I'm about to buy an Epson V500 or V700 scanner so that I can scan a thousand or so slides for my aging father. I will follow this up by scanning all his old negs (various formats) and then my own slides. The idea is to give him access to his memories without having to drag out his projector and screen.

My primary question is this: for these scanners which have a resolution of 6400 x 9600 dpi, how much disc space should I allow per slide? I'm the kind of guy who doesn't want to do this more than once, so I'll be running at max resolution.

Follow-up question: there's more than a x2 price multiple between these two scanners. Can anyone one comment on their relative merits and suitability for the job in hand?

My thanks for your insight,

Martyn

[BradJudy]

I bought a V500 for both regular and negative scanning.  I have a number of examples of scanned negatives if you'd like to see some.  I doubt you'll want to scan at max res.  Most of the slide/negative scanning services will only do 2400-4800dpi.  At 4800dpi, a 35mm negative renders into about a 28 megapixel image and 6400dpi hits about 50 megapixel.  Either way, I think you'll surpass the performance limit of the scanning optics and perhaps the slide itself before you max out the dpi capability of the scanner element. 

A thousand slides will take you a while.  You can do them in batches of four with the V500 and depending on the resolution and the use of ICE, each batch will take 10-30 minutes.  Not to mention the time to shuffle slides around and do any post-processing.  So at a minimum, you're looking at 40+ hours of pure scanning time for 1000 images, notably longer for high resolutions and/or ICE.

As to file sizes, I just did some quick scans of a 35mm color negative to check things out. 

4800dpi, 24-bit color, JPG = 3.5MB
4800dpi, 24-bit color, TIFF = 80MB
6400dpi, 48-bit color, TIFF = 286MB

Since we're talking 1,000 images, the math is easy - just consider each of those sizes to by GB instead of MB.  Any new external hard drive should be plenty of space and buy a second for a backup.  If you're going to be making 286MB TIFF files, you might want to look into some more RAM too (depending on your current system).

[nathanm]

Don't scan them at the max resolution, unless your intention is to make huge prints.  You should scan them for your intended purpose.  If you are just going to view them on a computer screen then only scan them for that size, maybe a little larger.  If you want prints then scan them for your target print size.  If you max out the settings you will just be wasting your time, money and disk space.  There's no sense in scanning for a 30x40" print if you only want an 8x10".  If there's some real winner shot you want a print of then give more time to that one.  An across-the-board scan-everything-at-max approach will only bog you down.  The more editorial work you can do on the front end the better.  If you can filter out just the good shots ahead of time and leave the junkers in the slide tray you'll be further ahead.

I haven't used either scanner, I have the V750 myself, but it looks like the V700 is a similar model.  It has great DMAX and will be able to "see into" those underexposed shots.  It's a great scanner and has outperformed everything I've used short of a drum scanner of course.  Batch-scanning slides is a real treat with the Epson driver.  Crops them automatically and everything. 

Dust is of course your enemy and combating it is never easy.  The Digital ICE thing promises you the world, but I haven't had the patience to put up with it.  It takes a half hour or something just to process one slide.  Ridiculous.  A brush and an air compressor are much more sensible.

Although the computer offers color correction and sharpening etc. in my view there's nothing better than hauling out the 'ol projector and screen.  A projected slide is hard to beat as far as image quality goes.  You never know, if you set it up and go through the collection using a projector you might not feel the need for scanning after all.  Not to sound too discouraging, but this will potentially be a huge, tedious project; even moreso than ripping a CD collection.  You will quickly be looking for ways to speed things up once you get into it.

[JohnR]

If the V500 can only scan four slides at a time, that might be a reason to consider the v700, which will do 12.

I don't think there's much reason to scan 35mm higher than 2400dpi (Edit: on a flatbed I mean). I'm not sure there's much point in going lower, as you still have to load and unload the slides and get rid of the dust... and nurse the software through preview mode. Get a rocket blower for the dust.

You will have to experiment to see whether the scanner software's automatic mode produces results acceptable to you.

1000 slides is a lot. You might want to look into taking them somewhere to get done - it might not cost much more than buying a V700.

[Martyn]

Thanks, guys. That's a great help. Disc space clearly isn't going to be an problem, so that's one issue eliminated.

Scanning time is certainly a consideration - 10 minutes per batch is OK, 30 minutes is going to try my patience. I'm planning on doing maybe an hour a night when I get home from work; it's OK if it takes a month or two, but not a couple of years! Unfortunately he's not going to live that long.

Image quality is important - in a 35 mm format, it's hard to beat the fine grain and dynamic range of slide film (mine are mostly 25 to 64 ASA). Since I'm a fussy bugger, I won't be happy if I end up with fuzzy pictures with solid shadows and burnt out highlights! This isn't really an issue for my father, because I'll be putting all his stuff on a digital photo frame for him, but many of his slides relate to my childhood and I'll want them at a higher resolution. I don't want to try to make these kinds of decisions as I scan; I just want to indiscriminately scan 'em all, so it looks like finding the optimum resolution for the quality/scanning time compromise is the key.

Since moving to a different continent, I don't even have a projector and screen any more. In the short term I'll be running slide shows on a 50" plasma TV; in the long term I might end up with a home theatre projector and screen. It's impossible to say what size this might be, but I won't want to be seeing pixels! Assuming a normal viewing distance, any suggestions for what an appropriate scanning resolution might be?

Brad, did you look at the V700 before making your purchasing decision? It's hard to tell from the specs how much difference there is. It's not clear to me which film formats the V500 accepts other than 35mm (I think the V700 might do more), and I suspect that the V700 might scan more than four slides at a time (as John has just confirmed), but it's a hefty price premium if these are the only differences.

Nathan, it sounds like DMAX is good for shadow detail; does this mean that scanners typically do a poor job of this? If one needs DMAX in order to get a decent scan of the shadow areas of a well-exposed slide, then for me it might be worth having; if it's intended mainly for rescuing under-exposed slides, then I can live without it (I suspect that the V500 doesn't have this feature).

At the end of the day I'm just an amateur - I don't have to produce posters or magazine covers for a living, my darkroom days are long gone, and I would be willing to re-scan if I ever wanted to have a poster-size print made. I'm the kind of guy who always has too many projects on the go, so I'm not going to be doing much post-processing for a while! Any further words of wisdom will be much appreciated...

[BradJudy]

I think the biggest difference between the V500 and V700 for you will be the batch size for slides/negatives.  The V500 will do 4 slides or two strips of negatives at a time and the V700 will do 12 slides or 4 strips of negatives.  This is because the V500 only has a backlight through the middle of the bed and the V700 has a full-width backlight.  While it doesn't improve scanning times, it lets you do much larger batches for slides, reducing your babysitting time.  I briefly considered the V700, but didn't feel it was worth the price difference for my needs, but if I had 1000 slides to scan, I might think differently.  Since I'm doing negatives instead of slides, I can already get 8 frames per batch (the scanner could do 12 frames in a batch, my negatives are mostly cut into sections of 4 rather than 6). 

I don't know how much difference the V500 DMAX of 3.4 and the V700 DMAX of 4.0 makes. 

Since your 50" plasma won't be more than 1080p resolution, then any setting at or above 1200dpi will provide a higher resolution image than your plasma. 

As Nathan mentioned, ICE really slows down scanning, but it does a decent job if you're not going to do manual post-processing.  As he mentioned, some manual cleaning can save you some time.  I've tried canned air, a film brush and some film cleaning solution with KimWipes.  You'll at least want a film brush - it gives the best balance of dusting, speed and cost effectiveness from what I've tried.  You may also want to have some cleaning solution and KimWipes on hand for times when you accidentally get a fingerprint on a slide. 

BTW: I had some problems with ICE screwing up detail on B&W negative scans, so don't blindly trust it - do your own comparisons if you want to use it. 

With that many scans, you can also look into whether you want to use the Epson software or a third-party option like SilverFast or VueScan.  I haven't looked into them much, but many people swear by using one of them instead of the stock software. 

FWIW: I have done most of my negative scanning at 3600dpi, which gives something like a 12MP image.  Plenty big enough for my needs. 

[nathanm]

Poor shadow detail is most definitely the weak link of most affordable scanners.  The Epson V750 was the first scanner I've personally used where this problem was tackled satisfactorily without needing the Full-Assness of PMT tubes.  The Epson has got bandwidth to spare.  You have to throw it a really whacked negative in order to exceed its range.  A bad photo is still a bad photo, but it's nice for the scanner to not get in your way so much.

[Martyn]

Thanks again, fellas. It looks like this is fundamentally a $200 v. $500 decision; I just have to decide whether doubling my productivity is worth the $300 difference (maybe I should buy two V500 for $400). I'll look into using a scanning service too.

Both my father and I are always very careful when handling slides, so I'll guess that a blower brush (which I have plenty of) will do the job most of the time. Maybe I'll improvise a ground strap to keep static at bay!

I've read comments on other fora about SilverFast being hard to use, so I think I'll keep it simple if I can. The time available to learn new software apps seems to decrease each year and has been tending towards zero for some years...