Vuescan .79 and Epson 4870

[Robert Feinman]

Ed Hamrick has bested his rival's scan software with this release.
Not only does he now support IR cleaning but his technique is ten
times as fast as ICE. It is now feasible to clean medium and
large format film with the scanner.
On my 433MHz computer a 6x7 slide takes an hour with ICE and
about 6 minutes with Vuescan.

 

[-]

That is some amazing news. Did both Vuescan + IR/64bit RGBI and Epson + ICE
clean up your negatives just as well? Which cleanup setting were you using
on Vuescan? (light, med, heavy) for your test?

There was one post here that said there were some issues between the 4870
and Vuescan using the cleaning function but that was the only post I have
seen in regard to problems.

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Douglas MacDonald]

The only 'problem' vuescan had was the test version Ed put up to get some
feedback from. It crashed a few times. The current version on his web site
is the real thing and it does work.
I am not totally convinced Ed Hamrick should be nominated for knightship yet
but by all appearances, his application does tend to look pretty good.

The Epson driver has some major memory use problems when ICE is enabled. It
does however (the Epson driver) handle colour correction of colour negatives
'better' that vuescan. With vuescan there is a selection process for each
individual film the application supports. If your particular film is not on
the list, you have to manually colour balance the film before scanning.

Epson's approach is different in that it does a colour balance regardless of
the film type which is surprisingly accurate. I have recently finished a job
of scanning some Fuji films for which there is no vuescan selection. I used
the Epson PhotoShop plug-in and the colours are very, very good. Epson say
they are "addressing" the out of memory error. I'm absolutely positive Ed
Hamrick would be working on version 8 of Vuescan which may well have us all
sit up and take notice.

So between vuescan and the Epson interface, it is possible to cover all
bases of film types. Vuescan is much faster than Epson's driver. VS's IR
channel dust removal is different to ICE and it too is much faster. What of
the results of a comparison? You'll have to wait for that. My early opinion
is that vuescan will just edge ahead of Epson AFTER they fix their memory
problems. It would be very poor form to try and compare the two when one has
problems.

Douglas