What a difference

Last week on photo week I posted some shots from my Kiev 6 with Portra 800. I used my Canon8800 scanner since I could not find the film holder for my Epsom perfection v550 scanner since we remodeled the house. The results were not good. I since purchased a holder and rescanned and the difference is amazing. I stopped posting for a while because I thought my technique (which is mediocre) was deteriorating. Now I think my Canon scanner was just getting worse over time so I present the comparisons now

Hello everyone. Glad to see your happy with the Epson Don. If you want to again improve scanning with the Epson, get a Better Scanning neg carrier with the Anti Newton Glass (ANG) inserts. For those old enough to "remember" wet lab printing, the negs were inserted into the enlargers with the emulsion DOWN. What substance altered the Epson engineers thinking to design their scanners with the emulsion UP, is beyond me. In their system, your image has a big light defuser above it. A "trick" shown me at Brook's was to put a cleared neg above the image neg to hide/eliminate "blemishes". . . worked great for many teen portraits. For extreme "zits", retouching on the neg back further diffused the offending blemish.

I purchased mine at the start of the scanning efforts. . not cheap, but well worth it, especially with some films that cup & curl like crazy. The ANG gets them flat! Aloha, Bill 120 neg scanned on V600 with Better Scanning carrier.

I find with the Better Scanning glassed carriers that it really doesn't matter which side up the film is placed, but the obvious way is to lay the film with the curved surface up,and allow the glass to flatten it. If the film is laid with the curve downwards it sags quite noticeably. The scanning lenses obviously have some DOF but the film can sag beyond those limits.

Great improvement, Donald; keep up the good work.

I thought the curvature was some annoying element that I would just have to live with. Makes sense, i now have a new GAS mission.

Thanx

I got one of the new Epson V800/V850 film holders with anti-newton plastic inserts to use on my V750, because I was scanning 30-some rolls of film that have been stored in rolled in film cans for over 50 years. Put the film backing against the inserts, to hold the film much flatter, it has a vicious curl. (Maybe after a few years of being stored flat it will get better behaved.)

I have the large format Better Scanning holder for my V750, which I use for scanning vintage negatives in 116, 122, and various film pack sizes. Works superbly.

I've actually found that the BetterScanning ANR glass for 120 can successfully pin down a most curly negatives, but the 35mm one is not heavy enough (simply because it's a smaller piece of glass) to weigh down moderately to ridiculously curly negs. The obvious solution is to flatten the negs first for days under a pile of books, but sometimes you need or "need" to scan negs straight away just after they've dried. In such case, I find the Epson OEM holders with clip-in frames can better tame the curliest ones. (This is a V700 I'm talking about.)

--Dave