Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

Post by sireat » Sun, Jan 29, 2023, 9:56 AM UTC

Aloha wrote: post #31

Const-me wrote: post #26

I also have an old Mustek scanner with outdated drivers, with no hardware issues. Luckily, my scanner is USB, and VMware Workstation allows to forward complete USB devices to a guest OS. When I need to scan something, I fire up a virtual machine with 32-bits Windows XP inside, with OG drivers, and scanning software.

Does Vuescan support it?

Vuescan is fantastic!

Aunt's computer had been upgraded to Windows 10 and HP printer/scanner had the scanner part stop working...

I was cursing Microsoft and HP for half an hour reading various failed workarounds. I was getting serious "shaving the yak" vibes until I found Vuescan.

Best $25 purchase for a software in the last 10 years.

Post by antiterra » Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

vvoid wrote: post #13

antiterra wrote: post #2

I assume the author knows their stuff about why consumer scanners aren’t good enough, particularly around dynamic range. However, for black and white film, I’m generally able to make out the crystal grain on 35mm with my consumer scanner and included tray, so I don’t know what more there is to resolve.

The silver particles in the film aren't very transparent and you can see this for yourself with a microscope. All tonal representations of B&W film, whether a scan or traditional enlargement, depend on limitations of resolving power to blur or alias the grain into a tone. Correspondingly, you will see a difference in apparent grain from different scanners at different resolutions. If you think there is nothing to be…

I’ve definitely had plenty of medium format negatives drum scanned and I have found consumer scanners to not be great for color slide film. But, scanning a grainy/gritty film like HP5 or TriX doesn’t seem like quite the same kind of challenge.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”