I have been shooting slide film for 8 years and I have always used an Epson v850 for my scans. I have always considered the scans from the v850 good/adequate especially when the slide is accurately exposed (not so much when it’s not). I recently sent some slides to Tim to see how it would compare. Having read so much about drum scanning over the years I had high expectations for the result.
When I got the scans back, I was at first a little disappointed, the image was very flat (a raw scan) and not what I had envisioned. However, once I got them into photoshop the difference became very apparent. For starters the level of detail and sharpness were excellent, it is like an image going from just every so slightly out of focus, to bang on. But the thing that made me go ‘wow!’ was the depth of colour, even on images that were slightly underexposed, I could push them several stops in post, with pretty much as much manipulation as I could think of, with absolutely no colour banding or noise in the sky (so common on v850 scans). One image I tried and failed to deliberately cause colour banding.
I am a bit of a stickler in my editing when it comes to the shadows of my slides and the drum scan extracted excellent detail in the shadows, with the real blacks of the image being black black, no noise. I was also impressed with the colour accuracy as my slides are shot in Central Australia which has a very particular shade of red that is hard to get right.
All photographers who use slide film yearn for that Velvia on the light box look, drum scans get close to it. If I could afford it, I would have the last 8 years of work rescanned by Tim.
