Yesterday my Epson V700 arrived - purchased specifically so that I could scan my images from the Mamiya and Rolleiflex. I plan on this being by day-to-day scanner, with really special images being sent to Tim Parkin.

First impressions are very good. The scanner is really solid (and pretty big), though as many others have said, the plastic film holders seem to be very flimsy - a strange contrast to the heavy scanner. Even just from one day’s careful use, I’m wondering how long these will last (it feels like a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ question). Replacements are, apparently, available. I find it slightly irritating that although a FireWire 400 connection is available, there is no Firewire cable in the box, meaning I need to make do with a USB connection for now (I expect the FW connection to be faster). Photoshop really struggled with saving these large files (several minutes the first time), but I did have a number of applications open and I don’t have much memory for this kind of thing on my Mac.

Regarding the scans: I have done the typical male thing (according to my wife) and just plunged straight in, scanning some colour transparencies and monochrome negatives. I had used the monochrome film (Ilford FP4 Plus) before in 35mm form so had some idea of what to expect, though I didn’t know exactly how the Rollei would impact on it, and my use of my lightmeter obviously needed to be up to scratch. The colour transparency film was completely new to me: Fuji Provia 100F, and I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect; this was shot using the Mamiya and mostly using the camera’s meter, rather than relying on my lightmeter.

So, with auto sharpening, broadly similar settings (though I am intrigued that the Silverfast software has a specific setting for the Ilford film, which I used) and general playfulness, I think I can say with some certainty that buying the Epson was a good choice. Here are two images that I have scanned yesterday at 6400dpi, along with 100% sections - this is not necessarily the best dpi to choose, but the files were already coming in at around 500mb with this size, and for playing I didn’t want even bigger files as they just slow everything down. I don’t want to make excuses but these are the first (monochrome/Rollei) and second (colour/Mamiya) rolls I have shot on these new (to me) cameras. I can see from other scans that I need to work on greater stability for the Mamiya when I’m not using a tripod - it’s heavier than I think, and perhaps my recently injured arm means it’s harder to hold still at slower shutter speeds. Neither of these images have had any post-processing.

With this first image of my friend Toni (taken on the spur of the moment in a pub garden, and yes, that is a fresh pint in front of her!), if you can ignore the fact I didn’t have e.g. a yellow filter with me, there is clearly a richness in the tones that does just what I would expect the Ilford to do - and the Epson scanner captures the depth of these tones rather well, I think.

And here we have a 100% detail of the edge of Toni’s glasses. It’s hard to know if I had focussed entirely accurately (almost certainly not, and depth of field was very shallow; I think I was resting the camera on the garden table as I had no tripod with me), but even so, I find the definition reasonably ok (bear in mind that at 100% and the more usual 300dpi, these images would be enormous!).

Here is the Provia, first the image as a whole (which, if I use it, I will ultimately crop, rather than leave at this size/aspect ratio):

And here is an excerpt at 100%, which again shows considerable definition (and the tif file shows good shadow detail - some of which seems to have got lost in the conversion to the jpg file):

I’m not sure I like the Provia 100F that much, but perhaps that is because the colours didn’t quite come out the way I thought they would; everything seems to have a slightly purple tinge, even when there is no obvious purple in the scene as there is here; I think that is very unlikely to be the scanner. In any case, I look forward to using the Velvia I recently bought - I already ‘know’ the Velvia from 35mm photography (the Provia was given to me by the same person who is passing on the Mamiya - he had it in the fridge but never really got around to using it, so it is quite old and maybe not at its best).

My preliminary conclusions: getting consistently decent scans will require some effort, as well as consultation with the manuals (don’t tell my wife!). But early results are certainly promising, and working with something like the Epson V700 will be enjoyable, I think; the time needed to learn how to do scans properly is perfectly normal (I expect to learn how to use a new camera, so why not a scanner?). There are some early niggles: for example, I would like to use a different colour space/ICC profile: I’m using the recommended proPhoto RGB in Lightroom as Adobe itself says this is better than Adobe RGB, and yet the scanner defaults to this older setting (somewhere in the manual there must be something on this…!). Above all, using something as good as this Epson scanner will require me to produce much better images in camera to get the best out of the scanner - and creating better images is, after all, what this is all meant to be about!