Well, the Epson scan certainly should be bested by the Minolta film
scanner: it's both lower resolution *and* a flatbed scanner with a
piece of glass in the way as well as a fixed focus optical system.
The point of the comparison is not what the raw scans look like,
really: it's pretty obvious that the film scanner produces a much
better original scan to work with. The point is that the flatbed
scanner *CAN* be used to make some pretty nice web images and prints
*EVEN* from a teensy little Minox negative. Remember that the
negative original shown here is only 8x11mm: remember that that is
1/9 the area of a 35mm frame, and it's on APX100 in HC110, not the
lowest grain, highest actuance choice of film to work with. AND that
the scanner, the Epson 2450, is quite far from state of the art in
flatbed scanners.
Given a full frame 24x36mm or 6x6cm negative to work with and a state
of the art Epson 4990, I bet you would be hard pressed to tell the
difference from all but the best quality film scanners with a full
35mm negative or larger.
Godfrey
On Dec 3, 2005, at 3:06 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
I opened the large images in PS and viewed them there. The difference
between the two scans was quite obvious, with the Epson scan
looking a lot
softer. When reduced to web-sized JPEG's the differences don't
appear to be
as great, and I had to look carefully to see them.
While this may not have been the best test to compare a consumer
flatbed
with a consumer film scanner, it does support my contention and
experience
that flatbed scanners provide inferior results compared to
dedicated film
scanners.
I'm not sure if you'd find the print from the Epson scanned negative
acceptable (I guess that depends on the size) but it certainly
wouldn't cut
it for me based on what you've shown here.
Thanks for posting the comparison. Very useful ....
Shel
"You meet the nicest people with a Pentax"
[Original Message]
From: Godfrey DiGiorgi
For those interested to see what the difference between scanning with
the Epson Perfection 2450 and the Minolta Scan Dual II might be, I've
created a web page with a sample image:
http://homepage.mac.com/godders/scannercmp/
The 600 pixel wide, post-processed images on the page are linked to
their respective scan originals (click on the pix to see the original
scans in separate windows). The scan originals are exactly as they
came out of the scanner, transformed only into high-quality JPEGs to
reduce size. Post-processing included downsampling to 600 pixels
wide, performing sharpening operations and a very minor tweak with
Curves to make the two different scans look as close as possible.
