The PS3200 is a flatbed scanner with a transparency attachment, capable of 3200 dpi scans on 35mm, medium format and 5x4 negatives and transparencies. I recently bought one when I discovered that there are now affordable scanners for medium format negatives, the lack of which had previously, and stupidly, limited my forrays into digital photography.
Physically the scanner seems pretty solid, though the inserts that hold the film to be scanned are a bit flimsy. Installation is easy, my copy of PhotoShop 7 happilly firing up the SilverFast software. Scanning is quite slow, largely I suspect, to my connection being through old style USB 1. USB 2 or FireWire could be significantly faster. I'm scanning at 3200 dpi, 8bit greyscale - this gives a file of about 50Mb - i.e. in effect a 50 megapixel camera. The software offers scanning at 6400 dpi - but I think that is interpolated, there being no real information in the extra data. 50 MB images (150 MB if I convert them to colour) are quite large and pushing the performance and memory capacity my desktop computer. After PhotoShop crashed from lack of memory, I increased computers virtual memory to 2GB. I don't think more resolution would be useable with my current, admittedly rather old, computer set up - 800MHz P4 with 128 MB of memory. (I've since increased the memory to 384 MB which improved performance considerably, howerver installing a USB 2.0 card did little to speed up scanning.)
Scanned 2 1/4 square inch negs look great on the screen - bitingly sharp and georgous - though some more than others. 35mm transparencies look pretty good too. The scanned images tend to have quite a lot of dust on them. I'm blowing the negative with canned air before scanning and I;m also blowing the bed of the scanner, but there is still a lot of crud left. Of course it can be touched up in PhotoShop, but I'd rather not have it there in the first place. Something to learn how to avoid.
I'm pleased with results so far. I've tried printing some images on an old HP 1120C printer on A3 sized paper. The printer is from a generation before HP got serious about photographic printers. Some of the results are quite pleasing - sepia tone soft nudes and portraits look good when printed on ordinary artists cartridge paper from an a sketch pad. However, if I'm going to take printing seriously I will have to buy a modern photographic printer.
Posted by bwm at August 31, 2003 12:09 PM