I am going to end up using one of these scanners to blow up slides to 8x10 photos on my Epson Photo 700. So far, I have been impressed at the Epson's print outs form print scans off my flatbed. It just happens that I do have lots of slides (around 30-40 I want to print) and its cheaper to enlarge digitaly.

My brother has the HP Photosmart Scanner. While I am impressed with it, I really am rather dissapointned at the nosie it gives off in shadow areas. I have been thinking about getting the Olympus Scanner. Is the trade off of less noise while droping the dpi that I would get with the photosmart worth it?

The other option is just save for a Super Coolscan 2000, but I don't see that happining for a while.

-Dan

-- Dan Samblanet (xbig_d@mailcity.com), November 15, 1998

Answers

Sorry for the slow response! (Comdex, etc...) One possibility is Ed Hamrick's software to drive the HP in 10-bit mode, do multi-sample averaging. See the link to Ed's stuff in our review of the HP. You may also consider the Nikon CoolScan III, which has many similarities to the LS-2000. We should have our full review on the LS-2000 up by the weekend, and have been promised a CoolScan III to review soon. (This will be a mini-review, since the software is the same between the two, just the bit depth is different.)

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), November 30, 1998.