Epson B11B178011 Best Price, Review, Compare
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Epson B11B178011 Best Price, Review, Compare.
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I bought this scanner a month ago to scan the several thousand slides I have taken over the past years. I'm not a professional photographer - my expectations were only to digitize my slides to the same quality as the photos I have been taking with my 7mp digital camera. After receiving the scanner (which residence up easily) I did an extensive state of tests to settle the appropriate settings (resolution, compression, etc), and then area about scanning my slides.
Now that I am 2/3 done with the task I can say that it's working OK, but there are goods and bads. I have no experience with other film scanners so I can't say how this unit compares to others, but here's what I have learned:
* Many have complained about the flimsiness of the plastic lunge holder. Mine has held up graceful so far, but I can procure no information anywhere about how I would procure a replacement if I broke the one that came with the scanner, which concerns me a cramped.
* Epson's web location is not very marvelous. They have a simple FAQ with some basic items, but nothing really ample, and no discussion groups. You are on your beget.
* As others have commented, the included software is pleasing basic, but I deem it gets the job done. It has at least 2 very annoying flaws, though. One is that every time I preview scan another plot of 12 slides, it turns off the dust removal and/or digital ICE selection. This means that you need to remember to turn it relieve on with every scan, which I have forgotten to do some times. There appears to be a diagram of saving your settings, but even that gets reset on every scan, so is useless. Maybe there is a map to effect this work true, but the sparse documentation yields no clues.
* Another software suppose is its ability to sight the vertical or horizontal orientation of slides. Mostly it does a really salubrious job with this, but sometimes it guesses atrocious, e.g. it will reflect a run is vertical when it actually is horizontal. Usually this happens if the amble has a dismal background. Unfortunately when it guesses bad, it crops off the sides or the top/bottom of the portray, so you can't impartial rotate it 90 degrees. Most of the time when I discover a execrable guess I have been able to proper it by rotating the trudge 90 degrees and re-previewing, but I have several slides where it simply insists on getting it unfriendly and the software provides no design to override this behavior. A related abominable behavior occurs if you have a promenade that has a shiny rectangle on a sunless background, e.g. a shot of TV camouflage - in that case, it tries to zoom in on share of the report, cropping off great of it including even some of the light location. I can win no map to defeat this behavior, so apparently the only remedy is to slice this type of image manually, which is going to be very labor intensive.
* Another spot relates to a hardware create flaw that I am very surprised that no one has mentioned. After scanning my first several batches of slides and examining the results carefully, I went into a mode of scanning without taking the time to query every resulting image. After scanning a LOT of slides, I started reviewing the results and was shocked to ogle that on obvious batches, there were 2 faint vertical lines (one green, one blue) down clear scans. I finally noticed that the lines seemed to be on 4 consecutive slides out of every 12 (the hasten holder contains 12 slides), so that was a clue. Scrutinize that the top of the scanner has a transparent cleave down the middle - apparently this is a sexy feature so you can search for where the scanner light is and leer its motion. Well, it also admits other light into the scanner, at least under clear ambient light conditions, ruining the scans of the 4 slides in the middle column. I fixed this by taping a part of cardboard to the top of the scanner. And now I have to re-scan a lot of messed-up images.
* I really can't gape that the Digital ICE feature does anything except quadruple the amount of time it takes to scan each status of slides. I tried doing scans with it and without it, and can spy runt dissimilarity. Not considerable of a dilemma, since I the Epson software de-selects the option to exercise it after each preview scan as mentioned above.
* I jabber it's not really a fault of the scanner, but examine out for dust! It's really vital to blow off your slides before every scan, and also the scanner glass. Despite being really careful, I quiet have a tremendous lisp with dust. Would have been nice if Epson had included a brush and something to blow with (I got a squeeze bulb blower that helps a lot) . When I am done with my scanning project I'm considering replacing the electronic air cleaner in my home with this unit, since it seems to be a dust magnet! 
* One last comment. This is not a general-purpose scanner, i.e. you really wouldn't want to expend it as a document scanner, mainly because every time you want to consume it, it needs to warm up for a microscopic. Fortunately I have another scanner for documents, and it works instantaneously.
It's possible that some of the items above are user error on my share, but with the meager documentation and web spot, it's hard to invent a detailed belief of the unit without a lot of experimentation, which might cause one to miss something. Your mileage might vary.
I have a broad collection of slides shot in the past 20 years. Lots of wonderful shots on FujiChrome100 and Velvia50. In the past I've had a tough time getting well-behaved prints from them from regular photo labs, and pro printers cost too great.
I have experience with an older Nikon trek scanner, and I am getting mighty better results from the Epson V700 bed scanner. I survey image improvements to 6400dpi, I scan to tiff at 48bit using the Epson software, then adjust color and dissimilarity in photoshop cs2. I rep very righteous results even from some warped slides where I always had focus problems when printed in the lab. Its very captivating to study these pictures again.
Despite top-notch reviews of this feature, I have yet to accept an acceptable result from the included automatic dust removal, both hardware and software based. The dust is gone, replaced by curious pixelation. Distinguished better to engage the dust by hand using the CS2 repair tool, which works like magic for me. After dust removal I increase sharpness using gleaming sharpening, and achieve to jpg. Its fantastic the detail that emerges with a miniature sharpening. Resultant jpg is 20-35megs, but is compatible with local printer's fuji frontier printer. With the control I salvage from manipulating and color-converting the digital image, I pick up prints that approach out exactly as I like, better than any enlarger-based print I've ever obtained.
I won't claim the v700 will scan better than a current race scanner because I've never dilapidated one, but the results I collect are certainly better than I expected. It is surprising to me that these perambulate prints are on par with what I bag from my nikon d70.
Bed scanning of slides is glowing expeditiously, about 45 minutes to scan 12 slides when scanning to my pentium m laptop. It steal about a itsy-bitsy to attach the faded slides away and plop unusual ones into the holder.
Installation was elegant easy. Unbiased install driver, inch in, inaugurate scanning. But the documentation isn't so first-rate. There is a lot enthusiastic in getting a helpful scan, its sort of an art. You'll need to read a bunch on the internet. When you first find the printer, play with all the settings, scan the same sprint over and over with different slide-height settings, resolutions,etc, until you collect what works for you. Have an conception what you want to gawk, then try stuff and leer if you can execute it happen. Like I said above, the auto dust removal might be convenient, but the results won't withstand conclude scrutiny. Ditto for the scanning software based "color restoration", "sharpening", or anything else. Unprejudiced post-process the 48bit tiff in photoshop.
I played around with the included silverfast SE scanning software, but found the interface clunky and there was no functional improvement over the included epson software, so I don't employ it. The included detailed scan manipulation functions are all available in photoshop, so I don't bother.
When scanning photos (as opposed to film or slides), the resolution makes a grand inequity. Some resultions will alias the print pattern. Getting a righteous scan from a print requires patience.
Outstanding product quality, but it takes work to acquire the best out of it.
We bought this scanner to utilize mainly for scanning medium format film.
The scanner resolution is superior, and the ability to scan in 16 bit mode provides extended dynamic range and ability to occupy subtle tone details. However, achieveing this always requires changing the default exposure levels, particularly on the vulgar waste of the scale. A limitation of the software, however, is that the histogram tool for setting the levels always shows the scale in a linear 8 bit mode (0 to 255 levels), whereas a log scale or optical density scale would probably be more appropriate for 16 bit scans. Photshop also does not have this feature but would aid from it.
A more troubling jam we have experienced is that all our film scans require changing the gamma of the blue channel significantly in order to carry out color balance. Once we had that figured out, the results have been favorable.
The software documentation is ravishing lame, as usual.
As far as film handling goes, the slump holders seem adequate, but the film holders feel like they are going to crash every time you utilize them. The medium format holder only holds the film by the long edges, which doesn't provide grand abet. One solution for this would be to improvise a filmholder which is like an enlarger holder in that it clamps the film on opposite sides of the image. The Epson filmholders have holes in them that the scanner uses to detect the holder type, and the software does a gracious job of detecting the borders of each image and presenting them all to you in the preview window.
Despite these nit-picks, this scanner is an trustworthy value. The scans we are getting off of Fuji Velvia 100 are breathtaking. I hope that the availability of these will renew interest in medium and stout format film, as these offer creative options which are impossible with digital cameras.
