I am 100-200 films into scanning an archive of 35mm and 6x6 negatives with a Nikon Coolscan 8000, but the scanner needs repair because of broken stage positioning. When it works it's still OK, although somewhat slow at about 1-1.5 35mm films per day when batch scanning, and the repair cost from Nikon may not be much different from a new Epson V850 (or V800).
In addition, the LS8000 is Firewire which means keeping around an old, unsupported, and power-hungry MacPro1,1 for 2-3 years to finish the scans
So are there people who have used both the LS8000 (or 4000/5000) and Epson V850 who can comment on some of the tradeoffs:
- What relative quality will I get from the Epson? The photos will mostly be viewed on a high resolution computer display (with some cropping sometimes), probably not printed out.
- Will the Epson be noticeably faster or slower when bulk scanning films? Enough to make this a compelling decision? I am using fine mode with VueScan for the Nikon to avoid banding (1 scan line at a time) so each 2*4 or 2*6 pair of 35mm film strips takes 1.5-2 hours on the Nikon. I would probably use 4000-6400 DPI, digital ICE, and other fine modes with Epson, but with a faster computer.
- How well does the focusing work in practice for the Epson? Once I have adjusted the feet for 1 film, is this fire-and-forget in terms of being in focus for other films, or do I need to re-check for each film? For the Nikon I can just say "autofocus, always".
- Any comments on quality of results with SilverFast (with/without LE) versus VueScan? Will SilverFast improvements counteract and Epson/Nikon hardware differences when compared to VueScan on the Nikon (or vice versa)? In particular when batch scanning and importing into Lightroom, not color adjusting each negative when scanning.
- Finally, how good (or not) is SilverFast at auto-detecting 6x6 film positions on the V850. This is one of the major issues with VueScan scanning 6x6 on the Nikon
Thanks! - Hugh