I'll be posting a more full (if not necessarily more professional!) report than this as soon as I get a few spare moments.. But in the meantime, my one-hour lunchtime play with the Canon FS4000US revealed that:
- It's a pretty good scanner with nice optics and good depth of field, and does *really* nice work on negatives - FARE is quite effective, and though I have not used ICE/dICE, it appears to give very acceptable results - It has what appears to be an impressive dynamic range, but... :-( - the catch..? - It suffers from noise, or at least this sample did... In dark areas of slides a lot of that dynamic range is marred by noise. Admittedly it is 'nice' noise (?), ie it's very fine, very even, and not streaky, but it means that for a person like me who uses transparencies mostly, and has a bad habit of underexposing them, this isn't the 4000 dpi scanner for me. (And no, I don't think this noise is grain or grain aliasing - I know what that stuff looks like :-), and the slides were K25's..) I currently have an Acer 2720 (one from a good batch!), and it is definitely better in the 'shadowy realms' . Not because it sees more shadow detail - the Canon beats the Acer by a very small margin here, BUT if you wind the brightness/gamma up, the Acer's shadows stay smooth well beyond the point at which the Canon goes *quite* noisy... Note that we *are* talking fairly deep shadows here, so for well-exposed images I am sure you would be very happy with the results - but for my style of photography, I need that dark stuff! Ah well.. On negatives however, it looked very nice, and produced superb colours, esp from Reala, without even touching the settings.. I didn't have time to give it a good workout on overexposed negatives to see if the noise showed up much there. I'll post a fuller report soon, and if anyone wants samples I'll stick a couple of snippets on the web somewhere.. mt Art wrote: >I think the new Canon arrived on the scene at the wrong time.. snip