How To Get An Old Version Of Vuescan To Register Properly

Introduction

A difficult 2020 that has blended into a difficult 2021 has made information technology harder for many of u.s. to go outside and shoot, but that doesn't mean yous accept to neglect your photography. If you're like me, you probably still accept years' worth of unscanned slides and negatives waiting to be tended to some rainy mean solar day, and a COVID lockdown gives you a aureate opportunity.

But are y'all ameliorate off using the software that came with your scanner, or should yous shell out for a 3rd-political party alternative to become the best results? Before I rolled upwards my sleeves and started scanning, I wanted to answer this question for myself.

To do so, I compared Epson Scan iii.9.3.iv – which comes arranged with the company's Perfection-series photo scanners and seems nicely representative of manufacturer-supplied software – with two of the near popular tertiary-political party alternatives, LaserSoft Imaging's SilverFast SE Plus 8.viii.0r22 and Hamrick Software'due south VueScan Professional Edition 9.7.35.

Unfortunately, SilverFast version ix was issued subsequently this article had been completed, but before it made it through our edit queue. We sympathise it addresses some of our concerns, but have non however tested it ourselves.

All 3 applications were tested with Windows x version 1909 on a 2018 Dell XPS fifteen 9570 aslope an Epson Perfection V850 Pro scanner. SilverFast SE Plus costs $99, although information technology was included gratuitous in the bundle with our Epson V850 Pro. VueScan Professional, meanwhile, is ordinarily $99.95.

Since I'1000 looking at this from the perspective of film scanning, I'one thousand limiting my comparisons solely to scanning of positive and negative strip flick and slides, and won't be because features like certificate or photo print scanning, copying, OCR, and the like.

Allow's start off by looking at interfaces.

Epson Scan feels a flake dated and lacks some features

Epson Scan shown in Professional mode with all windows open except the configuration dialog. As you tin see, there'southward not much space for your photos.

As is often the example with software from hardware manufacturers, Epson Scan's Professional person Fashion user interface feels quite dated and somewhat unintuitive. Information technology'south split across 5 floating control panels that, together, don't leave much room to preview your slides, nonetheless even so offers fewer controls than its third-political party rivals.

No affair how I fix Windows x's resolution and scaling, I couldn't access the reset button on this non-resizable configuration dialog.

Optional Full Auto and Home modes simplify things, merely too hide many features birthday. And it's also sometimes a little buggy. For case, no matter how I configured Windows' resolution and scaling, its un-resizable configuration dialog overflowed its borders, preventing me from existence able to do things like reset app defaults.

Overall, it'southward reasonably usable but not swell.

SilverFast is powerful, only overly dense and confusing

SilverFast has only ii operating modes: WorkflowPilot or Manual. WorkFlowPilot merely allows unmarried-photo scanning, and takes you through the procedure stride past step. Some choices feel odd, though: For example it won't allow you to just browse a standard JPEG.

SilverFast'southward user interface is packed with buttons and controls, not all of them intuitively named or labeled. (And quite a few are duplicates, increasing the clutter.)

Transmission mode gives admission to everything at once, but is very busy and unnecessarily disruptive. Button colors vary for no logical reason, and active functions are indicated only with a tiny red dot. Assist is provided throughout, merely the many (and oftentimes redundant) buttons linking to abbreviated PDF manuals and numerous lengthy tutorial videos make its interface even more cluttered.

I too found information technology decumbent to making me wait for preview scans more than than its rivals, and cancelling a batch scan tin be extremely tedious every bit information technology makes you separately abolish every remaining frame, one by i. This was my least-favorite interface of the bunch.

[Edit: I've since learned that SilverFast batch scans can be canceled entirely past alt-clicking the abolish button. This is, however, not obvious, although information technology's mentioned in one of 13 split up PDF manuals for SilverFast SE Plus 8 on the company's website.]

VueScan's interface is faster and cleaner

VueScan's user interface largely revolves effectually intuitively named and well-categorized dropdown menus. It'due south the cleanest and about responsive of the bunch.

VueScan's UI has Bones, Standard or Professional person modes, all three mostly using driblet-down lists very logically arranged in two to five tabs. It's cleaner, faster and more modern than its rivals, and leaves more room to preview your images. Its single PDF user manual is besides unusually detailed and helpful.

This is hands-down my favorite of the trio.

Epson is fastest, but at that place's a take hold of

Performance will, evidently, vary depending both on the speed of your scanner, and what hardware features it offers. With that proviso, I found Epson Browse had a slight edge in scanning speed, but with a significant take hold of.

Epson Scan took just under 59 minutes to scan 18 negatives at 6400 dpi with dust reduction and sharpening active, while VueScan took 67 minutes, and SilverFast trailed the pack at 84 minutes. Merely Epson Browse'due south fixed crop for batch scanning threw away a significant amount of image data.

Epson Scan is but fractionally ahead of VueScan performance-wise. SilverFast trails both its rivals by some distance.

Calculating backwards from the prototype dimensions as scanned, Epson Scan managed effectually 14.8 Megapixels/minute, just fractionally faster than VueScan'south fourteen.5 Megapixels/infinitesimal. SilverFast managed merely eleven.five Megapixels/minute, making it past far the slowest.

All three apps could use more than accurate cropping

While Epson Scan's car-cropping was by far the least accurate of the bunch, routinely discarding x-15% of the frame tiptop, I was surprised to find both SilverFast and VueScan also struggled to accurately discover frame sizes, equally well.

Both apps mostly got the frame height in the ballpark, simply had some issues detecting the gaps betwixt frames. SilverFast sometimes incorrectly rotated frames, too. Significant manual tweaking is needed for all three programs if you desire accurate cropping.

Although I establish its cropping setup the best overall, I still thought VueScan could use improvement both in its frame detection and its somewhat confusing default UI.

VueScan's much more responsive interface made those adjustments easier than its rivals, though. And Epson Scan was the least flexible, preventing you from batch-scanning unless you're willing to live with its automatically-selected cropping.

I did find VueScan's enabled-by-default "multi outline" option a bit disruptive, though. To look at the wildly flickering borders you'd call back the cropping was wildly off, merely the bodily framing is indicated for just one frame at a time by the smaller border seen on the tiptop-rightmost thumbnail in the movie in a higher place.

Just enough of the user interface. How did they perform in terms of prototype quality? We'll showtime out with item levels.

Similar levels of particular, but SilverFast has higher default sharpening

One of my first attempts at a yet life as a teenager now makes for a rather nice gauge of detail. In the 100% crops below, note the pale horizontal lines are fine water droplets misted from a garden hose merely out of frame right.

Perhaps non surprisingly, given they're all constrained by the same scanner hardware, all three programs turn in a very like result in terms of their rendering of fine item. In all three cases, sharpening and IR dust reduction were enabled.

SilverFast definitely defaults to significantly college levels of sharpening than its rivals, though, giving the impression of more detail. Simply VueScan and Epson Scan's images tin easily be unsharp-masked postal service capture or the default sharpening levels tweaked similarly.


Epson Scan	SilverFast	VueScan

Epson and VueScan give the all-time colour

All three programs can give adept color with some work, simply I found SilverFast needed tweaking more frequently than its rivals, tending to yield results that were too warm and with purplish casts, even with its color-bandage reduction and orange mask expansion enabled. Unlike Epson Browse, it allows the pic type to be selected for better results, but has a shorter list of film types than does VueScan.

Epson Browse's automated tools tended to yield the best colour, but were perchance a chip overly-saturated and warm for my liking, particularly in skin tones, and manual adjustments were significantly trickier.

VueScan's defaults were a scrap absurd and less saturated, although switching to auto levels or white remainder modes gave better results. Like SilverFast, it can right for the picture show's orange mask, but the multi-stride process is a lilliputian confusing, and it frequently lost the correction values, which then had to be reset.