kenJN

Hello folks. New to the forum, long-time slide shooter now about 9 years into digital. I have an Epson V700 flatbed scanner, and am not particularly pleased with image quality I'm getting from scanned slides. I have favorites that I want digitized, and some images will be submitted for publication in a 10"x13" calendar format. My frustration stems from an apparent lack of sharpness in the image when enlarged to 10x13. I'm scanning .tif at 600dpi which produces a file of about 20+mb. Granted, I understand that the sharpness of the original slide makes an obvious difference, and so does enlargement; but the slides are almost all Kodachrome 64 shot with a Pentax Spotmatic, mostly distant shots manually focused on infinity or family pix. They are sharp when viewed through a 10x loupe. What can I do to improve my results? Any settings that I should change? Should I expect better from the V700, or should I consider an upgrade? Or is this as good as it gets? Thank you. KJN

KTJohnson Loc: Northern Michigan

Try scanning at 4000 dpi. My slides shot on Kodachrome 25/64 come out pretty good using an Epson V600. Ecktachromes come out terrible.

MT Shooter Loc: Montana

Scanning a 24x36mm slide at 600dpi gives you a VERY poor image when enlarged past 2x3 inches. Scan at 3200 dpi for 10x13, 4800dpi for 16x24.

Leicaflex Loc: Cymru

That is most strange because I also have the Epson V700 and it produces really sharp images both from 35mm and 120mm slides.
May I suggest your resolution is not high enough, I scan at 4800 and save to a .TIFF file.

Welcome to the HOG.
Enjoy the forum and your photography.

jeryh Loc: Oxfordshire UK

I second that; I used to scan at maximum dpi, 4000 seems about right

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The scan resolution is measured relative to the ORIGINAL. To enlarge a 35mm slide to 30x20 inches, scan it at maximum optical resolution. If I recall, that’s 6400x6400 dpi.

You might want to set up a batch and go to lunch... It will be sloooooow.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Three other issues with Epson scanners:

(1) glass in the scan path.

(2) my experience is that one-pass scans suffer from what I call 'flare' - light areas bleed into adjacent dark areas; this is bad enough when something white appears to glow ... but I also had that happen in a picture of my daughters wearing bright pink rain gear!

(3) they render perfectly imperfections in the media.

I'm still using an old Nikon LS-2000. Nikon got out of that business some years ago, but I purchased mine from a guy who refurbishes them; I have to keep an old Win XP computer to run it, but the guy who sold it to me says I could also run it off Linux. It takes seven minutes to make 16 scans of a slide, but then it uses parallax to eliminate many surface issues. Of current production consumer-level scanners, I believe the Plustek 8100 is the best.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

ScanDig says about the V800 that, "According to our resolution chart, this equals an effective resolution of about 2300 ppi. Compared to the set resolution of 4800 ppi, the Epson Perfection V800 Photo yields 48% of its nominal resolution. The predecessor V700 delivers an effective 2300 ppi as well, which equals 40% of the nominal 6400 ppi."

So you can scan it to any resolution up to 6400 dpi but you may start to see the optical limitations at 3200 or above.

But those are purely objective lab results. Kodachrome will look great, just a little contrasty. You can adjust for that.