First the mobile gadgets and Cams
Importing pictures from them should be easy. Any appliances that uses a flash card, do not plug it in the computer, it will always be slower than taking the card out of the camera & inserting it in a card reader and do the copy from there. Not all phones uses external data cards so you can use the cable or set it to use WiFi or Blue Tooth. WiFi has a much better data speed, so set it to always automatically backup/copy your data when the phone is connected to your home network or in case of blue tooth in range of you PC.
The Scanner
There are quite a few Scanners out there, at all price range.
Since I am not working as a technical writer in a news paper, I could not check them all. So I had to restrict myself to an affordable scanner for everyday use, which also can give a good result with family media in mind.
I needed to scan all kind of Media;
• Color pictures.
• Black & White, including grainy, artisanaly developed pictures.
• Very old sepia pictures of all sizes & provenance.
• Negatives, 35mm & bigger ones from 70mm to 100mm.
• Positives, mostly Agfa based slides.
The only two I find that answered most of those criteria’s are the HP Scanjet G4050
and the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner. The Epson quickly fallen out of my list because it could only scan 4 negatives at a time, and due to its lack of larger negative scanning ability. I need this option to be able to scan very old negatives that are not standards sizes. A scanner with that ability can also digitize all sorts of X-rays negatives up to letter size. It is especially useful for small dentist’s practices.
So the HP G4050 chose me! If you want the overall technical picture you can check the CNET review. I will concentrate myself to my in-depth usage of this scanner. It has several templates for laying out negatives & slides, sixteen 35mm, one 4×5, four 120mm and four 6-frame negative strips for about 36 exposures. Quite handy and useful if you want to scan a full film in one go.
So all that was on paper and as I said in the beginning, it chose me because it was exactly what I wanted in a neat package and at an affordable price.
After I received it I immediately began scanning in earnest. The first media I scanned was a set of faded AGFA oversized slides, the result was mind blowing!
A s you can see the “newer scanner” is full size & the color are real.
When setting the scanning option, you will have to set it for AGFA, High Res, color enhancement and I also set scratch repair & a flurry of other parameters. Let me tell you that the scanning took a very long time but the results, color wise, were perfect. It resurrected the colors in a completely natural fashion. I also used a thin glass plate from an A4 picture frame to flatten the awkward sized negatives with great results.
The HP software is passable, it not always finds all the frames in a template, especially for negatives, the negatives color range is not great, the scanning is quite slow, the interface is bothersome and spotty and it uses a lot of computer resources. In short it is not great, it should have been livable if not for a trimming problem.
After scanning I compared the results with an anterior scanning made a few years ago & spotted a problem.
The trimming of the result was not exactly the trimming a used for the scanning, it was about 5% off to the back side of the scanner. I decided to try scanning other sort of materials & the trimming shift happened only when using transparent material. I decided to try and see if I could further narrow the problem so I searched the web for different TWAIN. After numerous try I did find an extraordinary TWAIN and scanner application that completely bypass the HP drivers. The “Silverfast”software cost about 100 Euro but it is worth every dime. The results, especially on negatives are a lot better, they have more gray range and a much better definition. BUT the trimming problem remained the same! At this stage I called HP support & began a one week back & forth, we tried everything possible including changing the computer & the operating system, it ended when they finally approved to exchange my scanner for a new one.
A week later having exchanged the scanner at my provider I tried to scan negatives and to my astonishment, the same trimming problem occurred. So at this point I was quite sure it was either the hardware or the firmware. I called HP again and asked for full refund. I must say that HP support tried their best to help me but the scanner not being made for graphic hard users, the support personnel was not knowledgeable enough, I even spoken with an engineer to no avail. After another week of support time loss I got partial refund. So for the time being I am stuck with this scanner. It is a pain to set the trimming so that the border of the picture will encompass 10 percent more so I can trim it latter. I have to set it by hand because I cannot rely on the automatic frame finding. It is time consuming & quite annoying.
All this said, if you overlook the trimming problem and use the “Silverfast” TWAIN the result are perfects.
Bottom line;
I have a client dentist, he scan his patient X-Rays with it, and is very happy with the result, the trimming problem does not bother him. I recommend it warmly for this kind of use.
If you only want to scan pictures, it is OK, but there are other scanners out there to check.
If you want to scan negatives and are on time restriction, do not use this scanner.
ilan
