Birchleo wrote:
Hi Bill, I still consider myself a novice. I read all the replies to your post, and see many people love the Epson V600. I’m sure it is a good scanner. I have 4,000-5,000 color slides I’ve kept in dust protected containers for 40 years. My wife and I wanted to digitize them. We splurged on an Epson V850. It costs more than the V600, but we finally decided on the V850 after comparing the two. The V850 is a flatbed that can scan slides, prints and anything else you can lay on it, but we bought it primarily for scanning color slides. It comes with two slide holders (trays) that each hold 12 slides. While the scanner is processing one tray, I can be loading slides into the second tray. I do a “pre-scan” of the tray with 12 slides that takes about 2 minutes. Then I select the values we decided to use for the many parameters available. After clicking scan, the scanner takes about 16 minutes to scan all 12 slides. We scan and create TIFF files, which are large (about 20GB each) and place them into a temporary folder. We then use PhotoShop to view and “clean up” each slide. The V850 somes with Epson software, but they also included SilverFast software, which we are using (it has a special “Kodachrome” setting). There is definitely a learning curve to understand SilverFast, but it is powerful. We found several YouTube videos that other users have graciously created that are extremely helpful to understand how to get the most out of SilverFast. After we PhotoShop the photo file (primarily to eliminate a stray hair or a dust spec or to make a quick crop), we save the file as a JPEG (which is much smaller) in the Photos App. We decided to move very slowly and deliberately while experimenting with options until we found the settings that gave us great results using a quick and efficient process. We’ve only just begun (less than 200 copies), but we are extremely pleased with our results.
Hi Bill, I still consider myself a novice. I read ... (
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Thank you, Birchleo, I really appreciate your comments.