Silverfast Epson V600

[Kizzy Burnworth]

Ipicked up an anti newton ring (ANR) glass insert for my Epson v600 which fits into the stock plastic 35mm film holder. Some of my film becomes very curved and does not lay flat in the film holder. I did some research on ways to deal with this issue and some suggested buying new film holders and I also saw that you can get glass inserts for the stock film holder. I opted to get two ANR glass inserts since that was fairly cheap and the easiest method. Below I am going to go over the results from using the ANR glass inserts.

These photos were shot on a Contax RTS with Carl Zeiss 50mm 1.7 T* Planar. I think the car one may have been shot on my Carl Zeiss VARIO-SONNAR T* (C/Y) 35-70mm; I do not remember. All of the shots were shot on porta 400 shot at box speed of ISO 400. Scanner is Epson v600. The ANR glass I got is from scantech.

I sampled three photos from my collection to rescan with and without the ANR insert. I cropped the three photos in regions that I thought would be good patches to determine if the ANR insert is useful or not. Looking at the overall photo is hard in this context; It makes more sense to dissect one patch to see the perceived improvements.

Overall I would say the bottom image with ANR insert is better. The shadow and highlight detail is better with the ANR insert. Also the entire image looks sharper than the image without the ANR insert.

This is another good example. The ANR insert again helped the shadow detail in the grill of the car. Some of the lettering (427 on the side of the car) and the license plate is a bit sharper. Overall I would say the image is slightly sharper with the ANR insert.

These tips were packaged with my ANR glass inserts from scantech. I did clean my ANR inserts before using them. There was some debris on the glass itself. I haven't tried any of the other methods that they suggested. I only used them directly over the film within the stock Epson v600 filmholder.

PLEASE NOTE: GLASS MAY HAVE RESIDUAL TRACES OF POLISHING COMPOUND AND/OR RESIDUE CREATED IN THE PACKAGE (DUE TO VIBRATION DURING SHIPPING) LEFT ON THE SURFACE. GLASS SHOULD BE CLEANED THOROUGHLY IN SOAP AND WATER BEFORE USE.

The Epson scanners have acquired popularity in recent years as being an inexpensive and good quality solution to consum-er scanning needs. Much has been written about these scanners online. And many popular solutions have been offered. The most effective of these has been the simple addition of an ANR glass - some have gotten improvements with inexpen-sive picture framing glass, expensive but questionable height adjustement stages and all manner of other solutions. From our own research into the problem of getting optimal results with the Epson scanners, we found the problem alleviated by a combination of a 'field flattening' ANR glass blank of greater thickness and density than was otherwise commercially available. This is due to the fact that a better scan can be had from throwing a little mass at the vibration problem with the Epson scanners. Film curvature and shallow depth of field is indeed a lot of the problem... but we also found that part of the benefit of the glass was the damping of vibrations from the stepper motors in the Epson scanners, which this particular glass formulation offers.

There are many ways to make use of our ANR Glass - it can be used directly to sandwich the film on the scanning platen or in one of the Epson frames. We will concentrate on this latter method as it seems the most expedient. We wholeheart-edly encourage you to try your own methods - but will offer what we have found to be the most expedient and highest quality method yielding the best results.

GLASS CAN BE SHARP! Though we have taken the precaution of de-burring the edges on the long sides of the glass for easy handling and safety, it is important to be aware that glass can break and result in injury at any time if improperly handled. Please consider this a warning! We recommend the use of cotton gloves to help prevent such injury as well as preventing the transfer of finger oils onto film and/or glass.

Note: This is in the context of 35mm film, epson v600 scanner, and the stock epson v600 film holder. You may have a completely different setup and could get even better results depending on your setup.

I think the ANR glass insert does help the quality of the scans but not as much as you would think. I have only tested this with 35mm film with the stock Epson v600 filmholder. The main benefit I see from ANR glass inserts is to make sure the film lays flat within the holder. The small amount of detail that it gets is not anything to write home about. One drawback is that the glass accumulates dust. You can see on my scans with the ANR insert that there are more dust particles than without the insert. I did wash the ANR inserts before using them but I guess I was not careful enough when handling them.

I would get ANR inserts to see if it would help out your current setup. I am curious to see how much of an improvement it would be with medium format film and when used in wet mounting. My guess you would visually see a larger improvement in both of those methods. If you are expecting ANR inserts to give you more megapixels in your scan you are looking in the wrong place. The ANR insert acts like a dial that you can tweak to edge out a little bit more detail and sharpness within the scan itself.

As most Epson scanners are bundled with EpsonScan and Silverfast SE software, two things that misbehave identically, I created this guide for both so that no one else has to go through the same pain that I did. However, this guide does assume you know how to use the basic functions of the scanner.

It's a bit the same principle with canoscan software, by selecting first the area without sprockets, and then check the button "apply the settings to the whole area" (or something like that, don't know it in english as I use the french version) and then you can select the picture with the sprockets :)

@szzs yes you just have to do it individually for each frame on the strip.

Although I havent tried it, it would be probably best to get exposure correct for each frame as you would for a non-sprocket film strip, then when you're done, turn off "continuous auto exposure" and move the rectangle to the cover the sprockets as the last thing you do before scanning

Depending on your budget an epson v500, v600 or V700 are all great scanners. The cannon 8800f is also a great choice.

My personal choice is the epson V700, which I used for all my scans on lomography.com

beh my canon 8800f won't work with my digitaliza! and Silverfast is such a pain to me. I don't like it. How do the Epson v500 and digitaliza go together? maybe I'll just buy the V500 and same myself time and trouble

I have tried following these steps repeatedly with my Epson V600 (and same info from Flickr threads). After I turn off the auto correction and re-draw the frame area to include the sprocket holes, the sprocket holes both top and bottom are "blacked out". When scanned the printing on the edges shows, and there are "shadow" sprocket marks on the image, above the blacked out area. I'm trying to scan with both the digitaliza and just putting the negatives straight on the scanner. Ideas/suggestions?

I'm using an Epson V500. I'm unable to select as a document type "Film with film area guide." I have two choices in the professional mode: film and reflective. I can't scan the strip. I'm using the DIGITALIZA and Epsonscan breaks the strip into individual frames so I have to assemble the strip in Photoshop. I'm scanning great sprocket holes but I'd really like to scan the strip as one image. HELP!

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