[Larry]

I finally unpacked the Epson 2450... I've generally had my medium format transparencies scanned at the shop, and my 35mm scanned by a friend on his Nikon dedicated scanner. Can't really justify the price of a dedicated medium format scanner, so the flatbed was a much cheaper alternative. Of course, I certainly can't expect the quality of dedicated unit... BUT!!! This thing really does a good job! The Silverfast image tweaking program looks really good, although I'm going to have a little learning curve on it. In any case, I put a 6x17cm transparency through the mill with the Silverfast basically on "automatic"...I'm attaching the results. This was a REALLY high contrast transparency from Rampart Lakes on a sunny Fall day. Nearly ULTIMATE gradations from Zone I thru Zone VII...a difficult thing to scan indeed. I'm IMPRESSED with the capability of the flatbed! It's a bit soft, but that's to be expected...and frankly I like soft scans myself. I did put a black border around it, because the "matboard" effect helps me to focus for some reason. Other than that, it was all "automatic" with the Silverfast program. See what you think...I give it a solid grade of B, or possibly B+...of course, it's all a matter of perspective. At $270, I'll keep it.

High Contrast image scanned at 600dpi. Resulted in a 60MB file. 2400dpi would result in about 230MB file. Resized the image to 707x303 pixels and saved as jpg. If I was to sharpen, looks like 40%, with a Radius of 2.0, and a Threshold of 15 would work ni

[Tom]

Hey Lare, nice pic but looks a little oversharpened. After resizing to web size you probably don't want to go beyond a radius of 1. Rule of thumb is to use the lowest radius / highest amount you can get away with and then adjust the threshold to minimize noise. Here's a good tutorial. When resizing my 4MP G2 pictures down to 640x480, I usually applied unsharp mask of 100%, 0.5, 1.

[Larry]

[marta]

The Mad River picture I attached to my message in Trail Talk is from a slide scanned with an Epson scanner and the transparency adapter. I haven't scanned much even though I've had it for a while. It seems to do an okay job especially if you want to take slides to the web. I haven't tried printing out a scanned slide yet. I suspect there would be a lot lost. - marta

[Larry]

[marta]

Larry: Nope, I didn't get Silverfast with my scanner. Actually I bought it probably about a year or more ago. It's an Epson Perfection 1650 photo. Usually, I just scan directly from Photoshop and maybe make some adjustments by switching to manual and accessing the Twain setup. For me, it's finding the time and energy to do the scanning. I'd rather be on the trail or in the garden. - marta