![]() This places the emulsion about a millimeter or two above the glass, depending on the thickness of the frame and the curvature of the film. However, that also means flatbed scanners cannot properly focus on the emulsion of a slide that is still mounted in a carrier frame, as the frame holds the film sandwiched between two hollow rectangles of cardboard or plastic. But for any sort of serious scanning I still haul out the old Epson 640U box.Īuto Focus isn’t needed on flatbed scanners that have a fixed focal plane located exactly at the top of the piece of glass. I still use the Canon as a scanner on a daily basis for simple tasks because it is WiFi networked. Actually Canon’s proprietary IJ Scan Utility software is quite good, but the scanner hardware itself is pretty bad uneven illumination, inconsistent color gamut, etc. (Yeah I know, it’s not about the cost of the device, it’s about the cost of the ink.) The Canon’s scanner is terrible compared to the old Epson 640U. In contrast, a year or so ago I picked up a Canon MG3620 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier for around $30-$35 on sale at Office Depot. It has a fluorescent lamp that still works like new and a surprisingly deep depth of field. I still have an old but excellent Epson Perfection 640U flat-bed scanner that works flawlessly. (I don’t care what happens under an Apple OS as I refuse to use hugely over-priced Apple products manufactured by political Slaves in Communist China.) That said I think for the cost (zero), VuePrint is still worth having.Īs for scanners, Epson used to be the Bee’s Knees. Another being that it is Windows only but it will run under Wine in Linux though. VuePrint has some major flaws though, one being that it will not display/edit newer image files like. VuePrint was first introduced in 1995 and is still available today as a truly free to download and use application. There’s an older application from Hamrick called VuePrint that also does a good job of scanning etc. The thing with VueScan is that it watermarks your images unless you pony-up cash. VueScan? That’s an old application indeed. Posted in Software Hacks Tagged auto focus, driver, film scanner, scanner, shim Post navigation You could even put together a passable film scanner with LEGO. ![]() If there’s some film you want to digitize, but you’re saddled with a scanner like the V550, you could always do it with a camera instead. He thinks the program likely has some kind of generic framework for enabling these kind of features on supported hardware, and it’s just mistakenly showing the autofocus options for a scanner that doesn’t support it. He did notice a few extra bytes getting sent to the driver depending on which focus options were selected, but the response from the scanner didn’t change. To confirm his theory, he wrote a shim program that would sit between the proprietary VueScan program and the V550 driver and log all of the data passing between them.Īfter tweaking various options and comparing the captured data streams, determined that enabling automatic focus in VueScan doesn’t do anything. The images produced appeared to be identical regardless of what option he selected, and he began to suspect the feature wasn’t actually doing anything. While investigating the optical properties of the scanner, became curious about the automatic focus options offered by the VueScan software he was using. The short version of his analysis is that the scanner’s slide frame does indeed seem to be holding objects at the proper “sweet spot” for this particular image sensor meaning that contrary to the advice he’d seen online, there’s nothing to be gained by purchasing custom film or slide holders. As you might expect, the nuances of these measurements are a bit beyond the average user. The first post attempts to quantify the optical capabilities of the scanner by determining its modulation transfer function (MTF), point spread function (PSF), and comparing its horizontal and vertical resolution. But is it really irredeemable? That’s what he set out to determine in a recent series of posts on his blog, and from what we can tell, it’s not looking good for the old Epson. From his comments about the noisy image and limited controls, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume isn’t a huge fan of using his Epson V550 for scanning film.
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