BeigeJournal

I have been enjoying my new scanner. It does quite well on color slides, black and white slides (I reversal processed a few roll of TMAX with the Kodak kit some years ago), and black and white negatives, including the C-41-processed T400 CN, of which I’ve used exactly one roll. I use color negative film very rarely, but I tried scanning a few frames and my initial results with that are pretty bad. Getting good color out of color negative film is rather more challenging than out of reversal film. I’ve gotten recognizable images but eliminating the severe color casts will take some work. This isn’t really an important issue for me given how little color negative film I use but if you wanted to use a cheap consumer flatbed scanner on color negatives you should keep this in mind and look into what software support for color correction is available for your operating system and scanner before you start spending money.

For $150 I’m impressed. I just did a comparison with two Photo-CD scans of color slides and it is distinctly softer. The color is less vibrant, though that may be improvable with some tweaking. The resolution is about the same as a consumer Photo-CD scan. It is clearly not as good as Photo-CD, but it is good enough that comparing it closely to Photo-CD is not a silly exercise. It is not a serious film scanner, but it is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot faster and more convenient than sending film out for scanning, which also gets expensive fast. It appears to be plenty adequate for getting images onto a web page. I’ve made some decent prints with my Epson Photo 870 using a now-aging version of gimp-print, which I’m in the process of updating.