[LargeFormat] Chopped in the Landy for a Microtek Scanner!

[Clive Warren]

Well,

I finally bit the bullet and sold my old short wheel base Land Rover 
to fund a new Microtek Scanmaker 4 which has a trannie tray for 
scanning up to and including 8x10.  There was a certain amount of 
sadness to see the Landy go as it had been a member of my family for 
the last 13 years. The new owner is delighted and it has gone to a 
good home.....

The Microtek scanner is still sitting in its box and waiting for me 
to grab enough time to make some space and buy additional RAM for the 
hosting machine. Have read good reports about the scanners on the web 
and maybe some of you have a similar model....

The purchase was driven by the cost of scanning 4x5s here at the 
local pro. lab - it is now about $25 a scan. It won't take long 
before the scanner pays for itself. My bet is that for the normal 
scan to Fuji photo print at the lab they also use a flat bed scanner 
as the file sizes they use are less than 30Mb. A drum scan would 
probably be a lot bigger if they were to go to the trouble of setting 
it all up.

As for the quality of the scans, the web is the first priority so no 
problems there. Will also probably be printing out on the Epson 
Stylus inkjet and have had very good results from that even with 
scans from photographic prints on a cheapo scanner. Cibachrome it 
ain't but this method will at least allow a good assessment of the 
print potential should I decide to pay the lab to do a pro. job.

If any of you do use the Microtek you may also have had a similar 
package to mine - it came bundled with SilverFast scanning software. 
This application is supposed to be the bees knees - will have to wait 
and see. Anyway, if anyone is using Silverfast and/or a Microtek 
scanner maybe you have some experiences or advice to pass on....
-- 
All the best,

             Clive Warren   http://www.f32.net
                            Large Format travel and stock photography