Scanners Again

I'm looking into midrange flatbed scanners for capturing medium and large format images. I'm leaning towards an Epson 1680 Professional right now, but I noticed a new 48 bit, 2400dpi HP model that looks interesting.

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I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this unit (Scanjet 7400C)? There's no dmax spec listed which makes me a bit wary and the software is HP's proprietary package instead of the AI's Silverfast. Still, at half the price of the Epson with a higher optical resolution, it is intriguing.

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Anyone used this unit?

You should also look at the Canon D2400U- also 2400dpi &48 bit. I am

using one and getting excellent 4x5 and 6x6 scans. I recently

compared a 4x5 color neg scan from the Canon with a Pro Photo CD hi-

res scan I had done by a high end service bureau. The Canon scan had

better sharpness, color fidelity and shadow and highlight detail. We

live in interesting times!

Dave: That's interesting, what you say about the Canon 2400U. Someone

submitted a couple of scans to the Imaging-resource scanning forum

that showed exactly the opposite; that the Canon scans were far

<i>less</i> sharp than a comparable photo-CD.<br>They certainly didn't

look as if they had a true 2400 dpi resolution, and another

contributer with a lot of scanning experience confirmed the poor

optical quality of the Canon.

I too have been disappointed by the online scans I've seen from

the Canon flatbed. My money's staying in my pocket for now.

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Tim: don't forget that part of the price of the Epson pro models is

for beefier, more reliable construction. If you plan to use this

scanner for a while that could be worth more to you than a slight

raw performance boost when new. For what it's worth, Epson

have recently announced new consumer models which -

surprise, surprise - counter the Canon and HP attack. There's a

brief report here:

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http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0107/20.epson.shtml

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For what it's worth (2), HP have a very bad record of updating

drivers for older models of their printers and scanners. It's

worse in the PC world, but even on Macs, where drivers usually

hang on sort-of working for longer, I wouldn't buy an HP product

for anything but immediate use.