HP 4890 & HP software

[art5533]

Looking for any comments on the HP 4890 & its software package. I plan to
scan the old 35mm & 2 1/4 slides. Ease of use and speed are important. I
don't have a critical eye. I have a Canon 5000F for document scanning. Any
comments or opinions will be appreciated.
Art

 

[Robert]

I've had a 4890 for about 3 days.

Scanning slides is great.
I've scanned about 2000 slides so far. I've been scanning at 2400dpi.
Someone else was posting that it wasn't actually noticeable/usable at 4800
or 9600 dpi.

It has a template for 16 35mm slides and the software lets you scan all of
them in a single pass.
It takes ~30 seconds per slide. The only hard part is if you have very dark
slides they don't auto detect correctly and you have to manually select them
and set the brightness.

There is another template for large format, I don't now if that's the 21/2
slides. Haven't used it.

Negatives however scan very slowly (for me) ~140 seconds to scan a 35mm
negative at 2400dpi.
If I set the software to slide (instead of negative) and scan the negatives
the scan at ~33 seconds each. But then I have to post process them in
Photoshop.

 

[Lorenzo J. Lucchini]

[snip]

Negatives however scan very slowly (for me) ~140 seconds to scan a 35mm
negative at 2400dpi.
If I set the software to slide (instead of negative) and scan the
negatives
the scan at ~33 seconds each. But then I have to post process them in
Photoshop.

The difference is most probably due to the fact that different exposure
times are used for negatives than for slides.
My scanner also takes much longer to scan in negative mode, because of that.

Scanning as positive and then post-processing is *not* something I think is
wise, unless one then sets the exposure times manually to best match what's
required by the film (however, the scan time will get long again this way).

I must say that 33s vs 140s looks a bit like too much of a difference: I
would have expected negatives taking three times as long as positive,
roughly.

[snip]

by LjL
(e-mail address removed)