Best A3 Printer needed & Slide Scanner Advice please? (1 Viewer)

Any advice would be very much appreciated. I only got my Applemac a few months ago (use photoshop 7.0 and Quark), and would now like to buy an A3 Printer and Scanner.

PRINTER

I need the printer for printing off all kinds of work, eg. photos, both small and large, cards etc and was thinking of the Epsom Stylus Photo R1800 Printer.

SCANNER

I need a scanner for general use and also for slides. Should I buy seperate scanners or one that does all?

I only started serious photography June 2005, father gave me his old Canon 300 SLR camera which means I now have a lot of boxes of slides!!!!! I don't really want to pay out, unless I have to for a Nikon 5000 ED SuperCoolscan (£750!!!!).

Do you think the Epsom Perfection V700 would do as good a job? and would the newer V750 (alot more money) be better still? I am hoping to have a digital SLR by next year, but have a lot of slides that I want to use/possibly sell, so when I scan them in I need to lose as little as possible in sharpness, the slide scanner is something I will be using for a long time, as my father has thousands of slides which I would also be scanning into digital images as well. I don't want to buy the V700 and then wish I has bought a dedicated slide scanner – what do you think please?

Best Wishes
Penny Clarke

I have a canon flatbed scanner for general documents but no longer use a slide scanner, in preference I use a slide copier from SRB, its got a Canon mount (other mounts available via T2 thread) I then just re-photograph my slides on a digital camera its lots quicker and I think produces better reproduction. and its also lots cheaper.

However I am not sure if it works with a cropped frame sensor, you may not be able to copy the whole slide.

nigelblake said:

I have a canon flatbed scanner for general documents but no longer use a slide scanner, in preference I use a slide copier from SRB, its got a Canon mount (other mounts available via T2 thread) I then just re-photograph my slides on a digital camera its lots quicker and I think produces better reproduction. and its also lots cheaper.

However I am not sure if it works with a cropped frame sensor, you may not be able to copy the whole slide.

Click to expand...

Thanks Nigel for your advice, have looked up SRB website and related links, very interesting, didn't know there was such a thing! However I don't think this is the way forward for me, I definately want to be able to copy the whole slide.

Best Wishes Penny

There are fewer dedicated slide scanners available now than 2/3 years ago as most manufacturers tend to make combination flatbed scanners with a film/slide capability, The Nikon Coolscan V ed being about the only reasonably priced one its still £425 though.
Epson 4990 combo scanner is £309 and a cheaper combo the epson 4490 is £179, Hewlet Packard do a similar machine for the same price. However most of the combination scanners do not scan at as high a res as the dedicated ones and are quite slow too. Prices are per Warehouse Express.
I have a Canon FS 4000US that is very good, however these are no longer available, have you tried e-bay, you might get a good deal on one there.

The Epson R1800 is a great wide-format printer. The 2400 is better, if you can afford it. On the cheaper side, you can still get new Epson 1280 printers for about $300. The 1280 was THE wide-format printer to have a few years ago and still produces prints that are great. I bought one about 2 months ago and love it.

Thank you very much for your advice Nigel and RAH.

Has anyone got the Epsom Perfection V700 and scanned any slides with it please?

Scroll down the homepage at http://www.photo-i.co.uk/ to see link to a review of the V700. The reviews page may yield printer reviews of interest too.

I see Norman has beat me to posting the Photo-I link. Those are very good reviews, and check out the discussion forum too.

I make electronic images of slides using a digital camera, a macro lens, and a Nikon ES-1 slide copier. The ES-1 is little more than a long tube with a slide holder at the end. You point it at a light box and take a photo. This is probably the best approach if you already have a digital camera and a macro lens. BTW I found that the ES-1 was not quite long enough for use with a digital camera, so I made an extension tube by buying 5 old skylight filters, smashing the glass, and then taping them together with masking tape.

As Nigel mentions, there are also slide copying attachments that screw directly onto the camera. They contain optics so you do not need a lens. As I understand it the quality will not be as good. But they are failrly cheap and convenient.

You can also place a slide on a light box, and then mount the camera and lens on a tripod, pointing down at the slide, and take a picture. A macro lens is best, but failing that, a prime with extension tubes will do.

I also have a Minolta 5400 slide scanner. But the ES-1 is more convenient, and frankly I think the results are better, with better highlights, and less noise.

Leif

I have a Minolta Dual Scan 111, no longer available sadly (I think Konica/Minolta got up to version 4 before they ceased manufacturing photo gear).

Whilst it's good, I have to say that the length of time needed to get the best results from it (ie. judging each slide/negative individually) means that thoughts of scanning thousands of slides is enough to make you want to give up all together!

Basically, it gets incredibly boring going through the process of making just a different format shot of a photo that you've got anyway!

I'd certainly look into what Nigel and Leif have mentioned above - using a camera and slide copier. OK, you've got to invest in a digital camera at some point but at least it will be useful for many occasions - film scanners don't do much else other than sit on top of your computer gathering dust...

Penny Clarke said:

Any advice would be very much appreciated. I only got my Applemac a few months ago (use photoshop 7.0 and Quark), and would now like to buy an A3 Printer and Scanner.

PRINTER

I need the printer for printing off all kinds of work, eg. photos, both small and large, cards etc and was thinking of the Epsom Stylus Photo R1800 Printer.

Click to expand...

we have a Canon i9950 at work and it produces good quality A3 photo's. We use it for printing colour client facing brochures on std paper and even the marketing people like the quality. It does however drink ink so we got a continuous ink system for ca £100 which made a massive difference. Note that with the CI system there are tubes all over the place.

Richard