Mark,
I have had an Epson 4870 for 3 or 4 months now and I see no reason why it
would not scan your film. You would need to make some sort of holder for
your odd sized film which seems to be a panorama format.
The Epson can actually batch scan two 4"x5" sheets of film at the same time
with one of the supplied holders. The largest I think it can handle would be
approx 24x14cm as this is the area of the transp lids scanning area.
For larger film sizes the Epson is excellent, especially its Digital ICE
feature which removes dust and scratches, etc. sitting on the surface of the
film saving vast amounts of time spotting.
The type of holder you make will depend on how much film you have to handle.
As long as its opaque, matte black and holds the film flat you should be
fine with it. The simplest way would probably be a piece of plastic or metal
cut to sit inside the 4"x5" holder with a suitably sized cutout. Then tape
your film carefully, stretching it tight to remove any wavyness or popping
during the rather long scan. I would suggest making a test one out of thick
cardboard first.
Depending on how this film has been stored you would be advised to
aclimatize it in the room you are doing the scanning in at least overnight
and preferably a few days as waiting nearly an hour for a scan only to find
it has "popped" or moved during the scan can be very frustrating.
A 48bit, 4800dpi scan with Digital ICE enabled takes around 20mins on a
6x6cm frame. If you custom made the whole holder you could probably do 4
frames at a time. ie: Set it up, hit scan, and come back in 3 or 4 hours!
Because it can scan and output in 48bit the file sizes can be massive. A
single 35mm frame scanned at 4800dpi in 48 bit is 151Mb. A Single 6x6cm
frame is over 800Mb.
Your films would supply files well over 1.5Gb each and probably would need
the 48 bit scans as old black and white stuff tends to be very dense in the
highlights compared to modern films and will probably need substantial
curves work in Photoshop.
Point being you will need a FAST computer, heaps of ram, (at least 2Gb) and
at least two hard disks with Adobe Photoshop CS to handle the 48bit files
+2Gb files. Using adjustment layers, (which you should!) your files will
easily be over the 2Gb limit for PSD files. You will need to save your files
in Photoshops PSB format which will handle over 2Gb files.
Opened 6x6cm files with a few duplicate layers, masks, paths and adjustment
layers as well as 15 or so history steps frequently take my scratch disk
usage well over 5-6 Gbytes.
If you don't need the 4800dpi resolution the scanner is capable of, your
file sizes will of course be smaller and if you have a lot to do you would
need to have them smaller or set aside a few years to do it! Frankly I think
anything much over 3000dpi is just enlarging the grain rather than giving
you more visible detail anyway.
If money is no object and ultimate quality, (maximum resolvable detail along
with highlight and shadow detail) you would get the best results from an
Imacon flextight scanner (various models) which is a type of upright drum
scanner. However these are very expensive, upwards of AUS $15,000 and the
other constraints re. file sizes, workstation etc would still be there.
Regards,
Frank from OZ
