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From: Andy Hewitt on 7 Jul 2010 15:45
I bought Vuescan some years ago, when Umax refused to support the 3400
scanner in OSX. When I switched to Epsons (first a MF 3600, and now a
4490), I liked the EpsonScan software, so found Vuescan was a bit
redundant.

But, Just today, I have been a messing about. In recent updates, I
noticed that Ed had improved batch scanning and auto-cropping. These
were things that I'd found impossible to get working when scanning two
strips of negatives, I only ever ended up with a mess of images, poorly
cropped and exposed.

I just tried again, and lo and behold, it works much better. It managed
to detect the frames [1], and after some fiddling about I finally worked
out some of the controls to improve the output. One of my favourites is
the Multi-exposure feature, which appears to be a kind of HDR tool for
film [2] - so far I'm impressed with the few images it's done tonight.

I did a comparison between VueScan and EpsonScan, and was rather
surprised at the results. I'm sure Ed has been tweaking things a bit, as
the VueScan images are now *much* better than the EpsonScan ones. Even
the Infrared cleaning seems better than the 'Dust cleaning' in
EpsonScan, although I didn't compare it with Digital ICE.

Speed wise, I don't think there's much in it, at least not with
negatives. Although it's not too shabby with multi-exposure selected.

The OCR tool it has also works very well, and I have used that quite a
bit now, although you do have to remember to rotate pages to the correct
orientation, or you just get a page of garbage.

My only remaining criticism is not so much its complexity, but the fact
the manual is rather poorly laid out, and doesn't include some
information that could be useful - such as a proper instruction on
scanning strips of negatives. That in itself makes the app less than
user friendly.

[1] something that didn't work properly not too long ago.
[2] it scans under and over exposed, and combines the scans into a final
image.

--
Andy Hewitt
<http://web.me.com/andrewhewitt1/>
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