I have had a CanoScan FS4000US for several years. It does great scans at 1k, 2k, and 4k ppi. It also has the infrared "spot removal" system, which Canon calls FARE. It scans strips of up to six 35mm frames or slides. The problem is that it's slow. I mean dead dog slow. At 4k ppi with FARE enabled, scanning an entire "rack" of six takes a /looong/ time. It's been a while since I scanned any film, but IIRC it was like 15 minutes or more for six scans. Might've been longer.
Something to be aware of is chroma noise or grain aliasing. At resolutions around 4k ppi with many films, the physical size of a sensor's view on the film and the grains/clouds in the film base are getting (relatively) close to the same. That causes some sampling problems (vaguely related to moire) that lead to colored speckles in the image. It's like noise in a B&W photo, but a rainbow of colors. At 2k ppi or 1k ppi, it doesn't show up. At 3600 ppi it's starting to show up a little and at 4k ppi it can be bad, depending on the film you're scanning and the photo in it. There were several long discussions about it here on the PDML back around 2002. One, in particular, I started on 26 March 2002. I wonder if there are any archives that go back that far. If not, maybe I'll see what the PDML can collectively check their local archives for those discussions. -- Thanks, DougF (KG4LMZ) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
