Photo Scanner

[Irmantas]

January 30, 2009 at 4:33 pm

Hi,

I want to get photo scanner, just not sure how much I am ready to spend and for what results I can expect after. I have those two scanners in mind: Epson Perfection V700 and Epson Perfection V500. Yes there is big difference in price and I am sure they both does great job, but…. So if any body has any experience with any of those scanners or any other, the please tell me what to do :) any advise will be appreciated. Thank you.

[Martin]

January 30, 2009 at 5:12 pm

Might find some info in here that might be of some use

Reply To: More Junior Hurling from Limerick

[Mark]

January 30, 2009 at 5:19 pm

I have a loan of a V700 here and this week bought a V500, not because the V700 isn’t very good
but because for now I’m only going to scan 35mm and 120 (not 5×4/10×8 – yet anyhow :) ) and also of course
its cheaper as a result.

Not I’m not really scanning in to print as I’m going to be giving the darkroom some time in the near
future. I only scanned a couple of negs and was happy with the results to be honest.

Of course, I’ve not spent much time using it or doing any sort of detailed comparison of the two,
but right now I’m happy with the V500.

If you’re scanning in 120, you can only scan 2 frames at a time (or one 6×12) on the V500 unlike
the V700 where you can scan 6 120 frames at a time…

The V500 is also faster to start up as it used LED lights which don’t need to warm up.

If I discover anything of help to you, I’ll let you know.

[Tom]

January 31, 2009 at 9:10 pm

I was making the exact same decision between V700 and V500 and realized I’m in the same situation as Mark. Planning to have a darkroom in the future, so went for V500 and I’m very happy with this scanner. But I didn’t print anything from scans yet and I don’t think I ever will. It depends what are you going to use it for yourself. If is that for contact views of the pictures, web presentation and printing up to A4, I guess V500 is enough. As I said, I have no experience with the printing…

[darragh]

February 2, 2009 at 1:42 pm

I also bought the Epson V500 for scanning 35mm and 120 (645) Velvia film.
It does a much better job scanning 120 than 35mm velvia but having said that, it really required multi-exposure scanning to get velvia right.
The other issue is that 35mm film is not held flat, maybe there is a better holder for 35mm?
I have printed 2 scans to far from the V500 and am pretty happy with the results.

Now if I could only figure how to do multi-exposure scans without buying Silverfast I’d be happy

If I was going to buy a scanner again, I’d go for a dedicated film scanner instead of a flatbed scanner,
The dedicated film scanners will hold the film flat and most natively support multi-exposure scanning

Hope that helps
Darragh