I'm afraid you can't sell me a new
Epson V 850 scanner. I know you guys are good salespeople and you treated me well, but...
You see, I bought a v700 scanner from your firm back in my old film days and it is still working. I've used it constantly for over two decades and despite all the things that I throw down on its glass platen, it still keeps on going like a champ.
I realise that the newer models may have more features and faster speed - more resolution and extra film holders...but the performance of your older model is wonderful. I can capture 120, 4 x 5, 35mm and colour slides as fast as I can load them onto the holders. If I need to clean up terribly scratched material the in-built ICE does a remarkable job. But it is the flat-material operations I particularly value.
A case in point: I recently took on the task of digitising family and service records for one of my wife's relatives. This was WW2 material and the decades since have certainly taken their toll of the old paper photos and flight records. Not to mention the albums and storage sleeves into which things found their way. I don't wish the job on anyone - particularly if they are fussy about dust, paper fragments, and silverfish.
Every photo page that held multiple items could be centred on the platen and a preview taken. Then it was simple to assign a finished size to each image, to brighten and improve contrasts, or to de-colourise as necessary. When I let the machine have its head it picked out the individual images with the commands and fired them directly into the on-screen folders I'd selected. It could not have been easier from that point on.
Mind you, up to that point there were a few hazards:
a. Old albums shed material that can sit on the platen by electrostatic attraction. You need to swab every so often to avoid picking up repeated marks.
b. Old albums fall apart - just when you least expect them. When scanning a full one you need to trap the part outside of the scanner in a large plastic bag to prevent it shedding photos all over the floor.
c. Black album pages don't lend themselves to the automatic sorting mechanism I mentioned earlier. If you don't make individual commands, the scanner will default to seeing the page as one photo.
d. Centring a page or aligning it up can be hard as there are no registry marks on the clear glass platen. I use a length of foam board as a soft ruler to align the longest edge of the photo to the longer edge of the platen. Then you flip the thing on the preview page and away you go.
e. I learned to turn over every loose picture to see what might be written underneath it. The names, dates, and places are as valuable as the images.
f. And for the observant, you find out things that no-one else bothered to know. Uncle Douglas turned up in a bear suit outside a Hawker Hendon target tug and waving out of the driver's window of a Handley Page Harrow...and only when I searched the pilot's logs did I find them. The Henley was listed as a Hurricane, which is stretching the elastic band somewhat...
Finally, you are a tempter. You showed me the
Epson FF680W - the scanner that digitises 6 x 4 prints at the rate of machine-gun fire. It's promising a photo a second at 300 dpi...and the family is threatening me with half a garage of baby and party photos in postcard size. I fear that if they like the interesting ones of airplanes and RAF service records they will have me doing Aunty Olly in 1959 until either I or the Epson V700 blow a fuse.
If I ring up, answer quickly.
