Epson V500 - Scanning for TV

[SF-East Bay'r]

I finally bought the V500 and have been experimenting with scanning
Kodachrome slides to display on my 50" plasma TV (1080p). I have a regular
old DVD player. I scanned two slides at 48 bit color and at 400, 800, 2400,
3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi using the Unsharp Mask and Color Restoration
features. I did not use ICE. Then I cropped the pictures at 16:9 dimensions
(using the full wide of the scanned picture) so they would fill my TV
screen. I created a DVD of the 12 pictures and played it on my TV. I was
amazed at how good the 400 dpi pictures looked. The 800dpi looked a little
better. The 2400 dpi slides may have looked a little better (hard to say)
but I could not see any difference between the 2400, 3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi
pictures displayed on my plasma screen.

It certainly is faster to scan at lower dpi, is 800 dpi really good enough?
Or should I get my eyes checked?

Thanks for your thoughts.
Tom

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

I finally bought the V500 and have been experimenting with scanning
Kodachrome slides to display on my 50" plasma TV (1080p). I have a regular
old DVD player. I scanned two slides at 48 bit color and at 400, 800, 2400,
3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi using the Unsharp Mask and Color Restoration
features. I did not use ICE. Then I cropped the pictures at 16:9 dimensions
(using the full wide of the scanned picture) so they would fill my TV
screen. I created a DVD of the 12 pictures and played it on my TV. I was
amazed at how good the 400 dpi pictures looked. The 800dpi looked a little
better. The 2400 dpi slides may have looked a little better (hard to say)
but I could not see any difference between the 2400, 3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi
pictures displayed on my plasma screen.

It certainly is faster to scan at lower dpi, is 800 dpi really good enough?
Or should I get my eyes checked?

Thanks for your thoughts.
Tom

Well, 800 dpi (really ppi) is about 1100 pixels in the horizontal
direction for a typical 35mm slide (800 x 1.375). Your 1080p display
is about 1920 pixels horizontal, so you're "giving away" a few pixels
worth of resolution. I should think that you could do better than a
800 ppi scan and actually see a difference on the screen. Besides, if
you need to crop the scene horizontally, you'd be giving up still more
resolution.

A resonable compromize might be to scan at 1600 ppi and then downsize
to fit the screen resolution, thus allowing for cropping to achieve
the most pleasing image.

 

[SF-East Bay'r]

It's a tough call. The slides I am going to scan are 30 - 40 years old and
haven't been looked at in at least 20 years. I suspect when I make a DVD of
some of them, and watch the DVD, that will be the last time they get looked
at for another 20 years, at which point, I'll be too old to either see them
or remember them :-( 2400 dpi is probably a reasonable compromise for speed
and future use. I should be able to make reasonably good 8X10 from them.
Thanks for your comment.
Tom

 

[Guest]

I finally bought the V500 and have been experimenting with scanning
Kodachrome slides to display on my 50" plasma TV (1080p). I have a regular
old DVD player. I scanned two slides at 48 bit color and at 400, 800, 2400,
3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi using the Unsharp Mask and Color Restoration
features. I did not use ICE. Then I cropped the pictures at 16:9 dimensions
(using the full wide of the scanned picture) so they would fill my TV
screen. I created a DVD of the 12 pictures and played it on my TV. I was
amazed at how good the 400 dpi pictures looked. The 800dpi looked a little
better. The 2400 dpi slides may have looked a little better (hard to say)
but I could not see any difference between the 2400, 3200, 4800 and 6400
dpi pictures displayed on my plasma screen.

It certainly is faster to scan at lower dpi, is 800 dpi really good
enough? Or should I get my eyes checked?

Thanks for your thoughts.
Tom

I would do one scan bitmap or Tiff for making prints and one scan cropped to
1920 by 1080 pixels in whatever for mat the TV will display (my tv will
directly display JPG files from its USB port some tvs will read memory
cards) or whatever the screen size is in pixels for display on the TV. Any
other size may be degraded by the tv resizing the image. If you need to you
can make the image smaller than the TV screen and fill the rest of the space
with a border. You can burn them to dvd so that you do not take up all of
the space on your hard drive.

Bob