Epson 4990 & Plate Glass negatives

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.scanner (More info?)

I notice the new Epson 4990 will handle large negatives measuring 6.5" by
8.5". I'm thinking of buying one of these Epsons to digitise around 1500
plate glass negatives of various sizes (largest being size mentioned above),
but want to know if anyone on this group has used one for doing plate glass
negs, and what sort of results have they achieved. I presume the 4870 would
give similar image quality; anyone tried plate glass negs under one of
those? What did they turn out like? I had a guy trying to sell me an ancient
Nikon Scantouch AX-1200, and he was trying to tell me that with the
"density" of the plate glass negs, I'll never get a good result with the
std. tranasparency adaptors on "modern scanners". He's trying to tell me
they (the negs) are "too dark" to come out any good. As it was his old Nikon
that he was demo'ing to me kept saying "too dark", but i'm just thinking his
light was going weak in the transparency adaptor and he was making up
excuses. He upended a normal lightbox and sat on top of the Nikon, scanned ,
and they came out reasonably good, but, no, i'm not parting with any real
money to buy a 10 year old scanner, that could fail 5 minutes after I get
home! So, any info on the new Epson for scanning glass negs would be very
much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

 

[user]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.scanner (More info?)

Go to the forums at www.photo-i.co.uk and look in the Epson scanner section.
Someone there was talking about using a 4870 with glass plate negatives if I
remember right. They would be a good resource. That forum has been down
for a few days though, so you may need to check back. The 4870 and 4990
seem to perform pretty much the same in some of the online comparison tests
(Google for them).

I suggest you make a black mask with the appropriate cutout size from 1 mm
thick PETG plastic that you paint black or mat board material.

Doug
--
Doug's "MF Film Holder" for batch scanning "strips" of 120/220 medium format
film:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dougfisher/holder/mainintro.html