I have a Canon FS-4000, which replaced an earlier Nikon LS-2000 (2700
dpi). It has made a great difference, particularly in my black-and-white
pictures. With the LS-2000, there was noticeably more grain aliasing
unless I took action to blur the image very slightly. With the Canon, the
grain looks like, well, grain instead of blocky chunks. Two factors affect
this: the jump from 2700 dpi to 4000, and the light source. The Nikons
use LEDs, and are notorious for maximizing dust, scratches and grain. The
Canon uses some sort of mercury/flourescent lamp. It's like the old
diffuser vs. condenser enlarger debate.
The Canon is indeed slower than the Nikon. Part of it is that the infrared
dust/scratch removal requires a second pass of the scanner head, so it
*doubles* the scanning time. It does this even on preview. In Vuescan,
you can the dust removal off while previewing, and turn it on just before
an actual scan. All this is, of course, not an issue with silver B&W film.
FilmGet, the Canon software, is just plain bad. It makes the scanner even
slower. With FilmGet, a fair amount of shadow detail goes black and
highlight detail goes white. I have never found a way to extract from
FilmGet the dynamic range that Vuescan provides. A pity, because it is
easier to use than Vuescan. But if you want quality images with the
FS-4000 in anything but flatly-lit pictures, use Vuescan.
And as Moose noted, the Canon's USB interface is v. 1, so it crawls. If
you use SCSI (I do), it's only a little bit slower than the Nikons on
pictures scanned without IR dust removal. With the dust removal, yes, it
is quite a bit slower.
The Nikons are notorious for slightly inadequate depth of field, sometimes
resulting in blurry corners. There's a workaround--focus about halfway out
from the middle, but this requires fiddling with each picture.
The pro Nikon scanners were designed with bulk scanning in mind. They have
(expensive) attachments for stacks of slides or for an entire roll of film
at a time. The FS-4000 is limited to a strip of 6 negs, or 4 slides.
Since I only scan the pictures I intend to post or print myself, the speed
issues are not such a big deal for me. My wife likes having prints, so I
always get my negative film developed with prints, and use them as proofs
for my own work. If was a pro, and/or scanned everything I shot as part of
my workflow, I would definitely have gotten a Nikon.
--Peter
At 03:37 AM 11/16/04 +0100, Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From what I can tell without trying one, the speed issue is tied up
>with choice of interface and software. Forum dwellers often say that
>switching from USB 1.1 to SCSI makes anywhere from a significant to a
>huge increase in speed. Vuescan is also supposed to be faster than
>CanoScan.
>C.H.Ling wrote:
> >I learned the Canon 4000 is very slow, that is the reason I have never
> >consider it. Nikon is the fastest in the market, if you need to scan
> >thousands of negative or slide that is the only choice. If the flare
> problem
> >can be solved its image quality is no poorer than any 4000dpi scanner.
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