Put Your Film Into Your PC
Want to take your transparencies digital? We look at five scanners--three flatbeds with adapters and two slide-and-film units--to make Editor's Picks.
Pacific Image Electronics' PF3650 Pro3 (left) was speedy, and its software provided lots of one-touch adjustment options. Epson's Perfection 3170 Photo produced scans that had vibrant color and good detail without any image adjustment.
If you've spent a lifetime shooting slides, or you've inherited your family's collection of slides and negatives, you may wonder whether you should use a slide scanner to bring them into the digital age. We looked at five models designed to scan slides, negatives, and other transparent film--three flatbeds with transparency adapters and two slide-and-film scanners.
Dedicated slide-and-film scanners have traditionally been considered too expensive for anyone but professional photographers and designers; now, however, a range of choices under $1000 is available. And flatbeds' transparency-scanning capabilities have been steadily improving. The models evaluated here are in the midrange in features and price--neither the most nor the least expensive. We tested them side by side to see whether slide scanners or flatbeds had an edge. In comparing their performance and features, we found some surprising results.
For this Spotlight, we looked at slide scanners from Minolta and Pacific Image Electronics, high-resolution flatbeds from Canon and Epson, and a less-expensive flatbed from Epson. All are capable of at least 3200-dots-per-inch resolution with no interpolation, sufficient for most nonprofessional photographers. We wanted to include Nikon's brand-new consumer-level film scanner, the $600 Coolscan V ED, too, but it was released just as we went to press.
Dedicated slide scanners usually scan at a much higher resolution than flatbeds and are more expensive. If you want to print an 8-by-10-inch photo from a slide or negative, the tiny image must be enlarged much more than for a 3-by-5-inch snapshot, so slide scanners need that high resolution. You might also expect to see better image quality from midrange slide scanners than from flatbeds, but our testing didn't bear that out. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, in our tests Epson's 4870 flatbed delivered the sharpest images, while the Konica Minolta slide scanner--with the highest resolution here--produced images we found flat and lacking in detail. And the least-expensive, lowest-resolution scanner in the bunch, the other Epson, produced images that we found the most pleasing overall. (We judged scans made at default settings, with no editing; all our scans benefited from some manual image correction, however.) We also liked the flatbeds we tried for batch scanning, since they could scan more slides or negatives in one batch than the transparency-only models--not to mention their ability to handle larger formats, including photos. On the other hand, we saw quicker scans from the dedicated slide-and-film units.
Spotlight (cont'd)
Editor's Picks
Konica Minolta's DiMage Scan Elite 5400 (left) has the highest optical resolution here; the PF3650 Pro3 can scan up to 40 film exposures at once.
Overall, we liked Canon's CanoScan 9900F Color Image Scanner flatbed and Pacific Image Electronics' PF3650 Pro3 slide unit the best. The 9900F had the easiest-to-use software and required the least effort to produce nice-looking photos; the PF3650 Pro3 scanned slides quickly, and its software controls provide a number of one-touch correction options.
Best Value
For our money, the $199 Epson Perfection 3170 Photo--despite a few limitations--is a first-rate deal. Our photos looked great without any adjustment, though the Epson Scan software has the tools to correct images without a hitch. Epson says the 3170's scanning utility is set to automatically adjust exposure, tonal levels, and color by default, which helps explain why its images impressed us right out of the box. You can use Epson Scan's Full Auto mode to scan slides or negatives, but you are more likely to want to use Home or Professional mode for more control.
Epson Scan's Home mode didn't have the tools we needed to bring out the dark areas of a very-high-contrast image, though Professional mode did let us make the necessary changes. The 3170 Photo comes with applications for more-general scanning tasks as well, including optical character recognition. This scanner has a smaller transparency area than the other two flatbeds, accommodating only 4 mounted slides or 12 negative frames at a time.
Best for Novices
Epson's Perfection 4870 Pro (left) comes with workflow software; Canon's CanoScan 9900F has the largest transparency area we've seen.
Though the price may be a bit steep for scanning newcomers, the nod goes to Canon's $400 CanoScan 9900F. We saw pretty good results without having to make adjustments, and just a little bit of tweaking yielded very nice images. The 9900F has great on-screen documentation, with extremely thorough explanatory material and truly useful hyperlinked navigation. Most important, Canon's ScanGear CS software and CanoScan Toolbox quick-launch interface were our favorites to use--both for quick scans and for more extensive editing--because all the tools needed were readily accessible and clearly labeled.
As your expertise grows you won't feel held back by Canon's software: You can turn off all the default settings, such as Auto Exposure, in ScanGear's Preferences. Another utility, called ColorGear, lets you optimize your scan for either on-screen display or output to a printer.
Spotlight (cont'd)
Batch Scanning
Both the Perfection 4870 Pro and the CanoScan 9900F scan up to 8 slides in one pass, or 4 filmstrips of 6 frames each. Pacific Image's PF3650 Pro3 scans only 1 slide at a time, but if you have a roll of film, you can feed up to 40 frames into the scanner's autofeeder.
All the scanners we tested display thumbnails of images after prescanning, and you can make adjustments to each image individually or to the whole batch. All the models also let you save custom settings and apply them to an entire batch. The Canon and Minolta units allow you to save all thumbnails from a batch scan into one file for printing or archiving--Canon calls it a "proof sheet."
Because of its ease of navigation through images and the efficiency of its correction tools, the CanoScan 9900F is our pick for hassle-free batch scanning.
Automatic Correction
Each scanner we looked at comes with some technology for fixing flaws such as dust, scratches, faded color, or graininess. Except for the Canon, which uses the company's own FARE 2.0 technology, all incorporate Kodak's Digital ICE, sometimes in combination with their own technologies. Pacific Image's PF3650 Pro3, for example, allows you to apply Kodak's Digital ICE, GEM (grain reduction), or ROC (color restoration), separately or together. And Minolta uses its own Grain Dissolver and Pixel Polish (which automatically corrects exposure and color cast) along with Digital ICE. In all cases, because these technologies require taking multiple scans of the image, you can't see the results of your changes on the fly, as you can when fixing exposure or color.
Instead, to use this type of autocorrection, you must select it in the scanner software and then prescan or scan--even if you have already done a prescan. We saw especially good results from the Canon, Minolta, and Pacific Image scanners, but the old "garbage in, garbage out" rule applies--the better your original image is, the better your final result will be. For some examples of these technologies in action, see the "Automatic Image Correction" box, at left.
So who should buy a midpriced slide scanner? Our test results didn't give us a clear-cut answer. People who need very high resolution to radically enlarge their photos might prefer slide scanners. But the flatbeds we looked at--with their lower prices, usable software, flexibility, and impressive image quality--deserve serious consideration by anyone looking for good results from transparencies.
Successful Scanning Requires a Little Bit of Skill
Choose your output resolution and size; let the software determine scanning resolution.
1. Let the scanner choose your resolution: If you know the size and quality you want in your finished product, you can let the scanner's software calculate the needed resolution. For example, if you know your scan is destined for printing at 5 by 7 inches and 300 dpi, you can put those specs in most scanners' controls, and the software will determine the scanning resolution required.
2. Adjust first, then scan: It's conventional wisdom that you should prescan, tweak your image, and then make your final scan. Here's why: When you adjust the image before scanning, your final scan retains more data than when you make a similar change in a program like Photoshop Elements. And keeping more data gives you flexibility in how you use your image later.
3. Keep your media clean: The more you handle film, the more smudges and dust they'll pick up, and the more cleanup you'll need to do while scanning. Keep slides and negatives tucked away until you really need to take them out. You know to hold negatives by the edges, but try using cotton gloves as well, which will also help keep a flatbed's scanning glass clean. You can get these inexpensive gloves from professional photography shops and from sites like CameraWorld.com. You can remove dust from film with a soft brush or compressed air (but go easy--a strong blast can damage your film).
4. Expect to edit: You may have visions of ripping through a generation's worth of slides in an afternoon, but if you want attractive photos you'll need to invest some time in tweaking them. If batch scanning is important to you, choose a model that makes batch prescanning and adjustments easy, like Canon's CanoScan 9900F.
5. Dig into your software: Getting acquainted with your scanner's advanced control software gives you access to the editing tools that produce the best images.
6. Get educated: A little expert advice can help you get better results, faster. One good reference on scanning and image management is Real World Scanning and Halftones, 2nd ed. (by Blatner, Fleishman, and Roth; Peachpit Press, 1998). It has in-depth information on tone and color correction, plus a thorough explanation of resolution. A new edition should be arriving in bookstores soon after you read this. And if Photoshop Elements 2 is your image editor of choice, Photoshop Elements 2 Restoration and Retouching (by Laurie Ulrich; Wiley, 2003) is a useful reference.