Re: filmscanners: Canon 4000 ppi film scanner

["Mark T." <markthomasz@ozemail.com.au>]

I'll be posting a more full (if not necessarily more professional!) report 
than this as soon as I get a few spare moments..
But in the meantime, my one-hour lunchtime play with the Canon FS4000US 
revealed that:

- It's a pretty good scanner with nice optics and good depth of field, and 
does *really* nice work on negatives
- FARE is quite effective, and though I have not used ICE/dICE, it appears 
to give very acceptable results
- It has what appears to be an impressive dynamic range, but... :-(
- the catch..?  - It suffers from noise, or at least this sample did...

In dark areas of slides a lot of that dynamic range is marred by 
noise.  Admittedly it is 'nice' noise (?), ie it's very fine, very even, 
and not streaky, but it means that for a person like me who uses 
transparencies mostly, and has a bad habit of underexposing them, this 
isn't the 4000 dpi scanner for me.  (And no, I don't think this noise is 
grain or grain aliasing - I know what that stuff looks like :-), and the 
slides were K25's..)

I currently have an Acer 2720 (one from a good batch!), and it is 
definitely better in the 'shadowy realms' .  Not because it sees more 
shadow detail - the Canon beats the Acer by a very small margin here, BUT 
if you wind the brightness/gamma up, the Acer's shadows stay smooth well 
beyond the point at which the Canon goes *quite* noisy...  Note that we 
*are* talking fairly deep shadows here, so for well-exposed images I am 
sure you would be very happy with the results - but for my style of 
photography, I need that dark stuff!

Ah well..

On negatives however, it looked very nice, and produced superb colours, esp 
from Reala, without even touching the settings..  I didn't have time to 
give it a good workout on overexposed negatives to see if the noise showed 
up much there.

I'll post a fuller report soon, and if anyone wants samples I'll stick a 
couple of snippets on the web somewhere..

mt

Art wrote:
>I think the new Canon arrived on the scene at the wrong time..
snip