( 107 reviews )
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Aug 11 2009
V500 Scanner: 4-1/2 stars. Suits my needs, and for around $200, it's a good deal. I am scanning Kodachrome 64 primarily, for archive reasons. Generally, I've been very pleased. The dust removal feature works nicely almost all the time. I am scanning at 6400 dpi and you can clearly see the KC-64 grain at this resolution. (The scanner "goes to 11" as well: It says it will go to 12,000 dpi, which I haven't used: For KC-25 maybe?) You can see a slight pixelating effect on the grain; but the grain is obvious. It is a notable improvement over my older 3200 dpi scans: Quite noticeable on large (13X19) prints. The color is true. The resulting scans are beautiful and very true to the slide image. The slide holder is very easy to use. I am scanning in the "Professional" mode, using Unsharp Mask checked on and Dust Removal checked on (only these two) and usually run the dust removal at "High" unless it has issues (I've had it do a couple of things I didn't like when set to "High": darkening in star trails on long night exposures and on one shot with climbers on a glacier, it filled in one of the figures (!) well, they were small and dark against the ~white background. That one was kind of humorous actually.) The ICE feature doesn't work well with KC-64. I haven't needed to use it. When using the ICE feature, small highlit areas became grossly exaggerated and looked like little burned-out white glow worms pasted onto the object in the slide: Very ugly effect. I only tried it a couple of times, so I don't know the ins and outs of it. I don't recommend the "color restoration" feature unless you have truly faded or damaged images. It gave weird color shifts when used on regular images. It's slow at 6400 dpi, as expected. It takes about 2 minutes per slide. It has this quirk: I can preview scan four slides at a time (which is nice, less time brushing off the glass, etc.) but when I select all four slides for the final scan (I would prefer to do this and then walk away for 5-8 minutes and do something else while it's scanning) it seems to "forget" my settings on the scan menus. That is: It applies the dust removal feature only to the first scan. Annoying. So, I now preview all together, then scan individually. This seems to do the trick. More than likely, if I read the manual, I could solve this ... (you know: manual, schmanual ...) [Update on 11-Aug-09: I figured out how to make it apply the settings to all four slides: The little check boxes beneath each thumbnail are used to tell it which slides to scan. The blue "select" rings around the thumbnail (click on the thumbnail to activate) are used to tell the SW to apply the settings (such as dust removal) to the scans. I suppose there's some logic there: You may want to select these separately. But how about two check boxes, with labels??] It indicates that you can save your scanning settings - and it does save them; but wipes them out for every preview. If you select the settings saved, you have to re-do the preview scan ... and it wipes the settings again. You have to set options manually after every preview. Another annoying issue. But, once you get into the flow of scanning, it sort of becomes automatic. I've made pdfs and scanned a number of types of photos in color and B&W as well with very nice results. Sometimes it does take a few tries to get the right settings in the "Professional" mode. No big deal. I made one scan in the "Family" mode (or maybe it was "home" mode). It didn't have any settings to choose as a far as I could see and scanned slides at about 300 or 600 dpi. Might be OK for 3X5 prints. Garbage for anything else. Use only the "Professional" mode. I just noticed this on Wikipedia: "Kodachrome 64 and Kodachrome 64 Professional 135 format were discontinued in June 2009" The end of a great era ... I have to admit, I haven't bought any in many years ...
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Posted: Aug 10 2009
This equipment is perfect, easy to operate, excellent resuts. I can recommend this scanner 100%
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Posted: Aug 6 2009
Does a very good job on medium format B&W negatives. Produced high quality prints from 50 year old negatives. Great value for $ spent. Amazon shipped quickly as usual.
