4x5 Film Scanner Question

[jaypie77]

I'm sorry, this isn't about the EOS system, but I thought this would be a good place to ask. I'm looking for a good 4x5 scanner that can produce really high quality, crisp results. Anybody have experience with these that can offer a recommendation?

[chtgrubbs]

Scanners for 4x5 images are rather few and far between. A service bureau or prepress house can scan them for you on their drum scanner. Imacon makes the Flextight desktop drum scanner for 4x5, but it costs $9995.99 at B&H. Those would be the best solutions if you want to make scans to produce really large prints. Epson and Microtek make flat bed scanners which will scan transparencies up to 8x10. They may not be up to making billboard size scans, but should do fine for web scans or normal size prints. I just received the Epson 4990 which I will use to scan 2 1/4 and 4x5 trannies and negs. You can PM me and I'll let you know how it goes.

[UncleDoug]

Scanners for 4x5 images are rather few and far between. A service bureau or prepress house can scan them for you on their drum scanner. Imacon makes the Flextight desktop drum scanner for 4x5, but it costs $9995.99 at B&H. Those would be the best solutions if you want to make scans to produce really large prints. Epson and Microtek make flat bed scanners which will scan transparencies up to 8x10. They may not be up to making billboard size scans, but should do fine for web scans or normal size prints. I just received the Epson 4990 which I will use to scan 2 1/4 and 4x5 trannies and negs. You can PM me and I'll let you know how it goes.

I vote for the Drum scanner solution as well.
Drum scanners can be obtained from e-bay at "reasonable" cost as drum scanners go. If you were to get a Howtek there is a company, AZTEK, that still services them. By the way AZTEK is an awesome company. Very helpful and willing to go the extra mile or two,
Here are a few helpful links.

AZTEK (http://www.aztek.com)

Scan Hi-End group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ScanHi-End/)

AZTEK users group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aztekusers/)

I personally would not recommend the Flextight on several points.
1. It is not a drum scanner that uses Photo Multiplier Tubes. It is a "hi-end" CCD scanner.
2. The reviews I have heard regarding the over-all performance just don't measure up.
3. If a company claims that their product is something it is not, claiming that a Flextight is a drum scanner, I would rather poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick than support that company. Blatant misrepresentation of their product.

Several flatbed scanners will allow you to wet-mount your film, as in drum scanning, but if you take this approach - do your research.

The above mentioned link to the Scan Hi-End group is an EXCELLENT source for more information on this subject.

[rdenney]

I'm sorry, this isn't about the EOS system, but I thought this would be a good place to ask. I'm looking for a good 4x5 scanner that can produce really high quality, crisp results. Anybody have experience with these that can offer a recommendation?

It depends on your 4x5 films and on your print-size requirements.

Drum scanners offer two advantages over flat-bed scanners: Resolution and dynamic range. If you have Velvia trannies, then the dynamic range is important. You may have a density range of 0 to perhaps 3.6 or even 3.9. Flatbed scanners can rarely work beyond 3.3, and so you'll lose shadow detail in the scan.

But flatbeds work fine in terms of resolution. I have an old, cheap Acer 1200 pixel/inch flatbed with about a 6x8 transparency adaptor. If I scan at 1200 and then downsample it to 800, it's quite sharp--as sharp as a film scanner. Even without downsampling, the 13x19 prints I make (that would be 15x18 or so before cropping to fit my 13" carriage) are tack sharp even under a loupe. I would expect an Epson that scans at 4800 or whatever it's up to now would do better (but not four times better).

The dynamic range is still a problem, though, especially if you start with high-contrast transparencies like Velvia. You'll lose the shadows for sure. One way to help is to use multiple passes and average the results--VueScan provides multipass multiscanning even on scanners that supposedly don't do multiscanning. It will get you about another .3 of density. You'll still clip the images at 3.6 Dmax even if everything is working well. I've had better luck with black and white and with color negative materials in inexpensive scanners. (You can also make two exposures, one for the highlights and the other for the shadows, and merge them in Photoshop. This is similar to the extreme measures we employed for printing Cibachrome, which did not have the dynamic range of transparencies. We made contrast masks on black-and-white copy film and then sandwiched it with the tranny during printing to pull the highlights down so we could fit the tonal range onto the narrow print. It's much easier in Photoshop.)

If you want to make very large prints (larger than about 16x20) and maintain excellent sharpness, you'll need those drum scans. And if your transparencies have lots of dynamic range that you must preserve, then you'll need the drum scanner or you'll be working very hard. But for display prints up to 16x20 with about the same contrast capability as Cibachrome, a good flatbed will do pretty well.

Rick "who doesn't use slide materials because they are so hard to scan cheaply" Denney