Epson Perfection 4990 PHOTO scanner user experience report

I do not intend to write a comprehensive review of the scanner outlining all its possible uses and technical characteristics; I will skip writing about such aspects as packaging or software installation, too. Instead, I would like to briefly share my experience with the scanner, which I bought primarily for scanning 120 slide film.

My purchase of the Epson 4990 was based on the following factors: first, it looks very impressive on paper (optical resolution of 4800dpi, 4.0 DMax, 16–bit output, Digital ICE for scratch and dirt removal, scans any film format ranging from 35mm to 8X10); second, some Web sites as here or here suggest that the Epson 4990 is almost as good as dedicated film scanners from Minolta and Nikon. Even though for some reason it was more expensive where I live than in the rest of the world, the Epson 4990 still appeared to be a great value for the money.

Below I also compare performance of the Epson 4990 (scanning 35mm film) with that of the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II. The latter is a dedicated 35mm film scanner that features maximum optical resolution of 2820dpi, Digital ICE, GEM and ROC, 16–bit colour output and multi–sample scanning up to 16X. I have used it for almost three years now and, whereas I have been mostly satisfied with its performance, it is an old scanner that has been long replaced by newer and better models. The Epson 4990 looked and sounded so good that it appeared able to replace my old Minolta—hence the comparison (note that it was done in the same OS/hardware environment).

On a positive note, I like the Epson software, which is easy to use. Digital ICE, indeed, removes dust and scratches and I would not buy/use a scanner without this feature. Colour reproduction generally is very good; that said, though, every once in a while I get nasty colour casts that take quite a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to remove. The scanner's ability to extract shadow detail appears consistent with the claimed DMax of 4.0.

However, there are several aspects where the scanner's performance is not as brilliant as I hoped it would be. Talking about mechanical construction, film holders are all glassless and quite flimsy. As a result, they cannot keep 120 film flat especially if it is significantly curled. This does not seem to influence sharpness; however, it causes distortion of the geometry of scanned images. The two aspects that drew even more of my attention, however, were scan times and resolution.

Scan times

To cut to the chase, the scanner is preposterously slow. How slow? Well, I will let the numbers speak for themselves. Before we get to that, though, I have to note that scanning time indication in the software is entirely unreliable. When you press the scan button scanning begins, and the software estimates how long it is going to take. However, the estimation might change several times during the process of scanning and jump from, say, four minutes to thirty nine or from "less than a minute" to 10 minutes. In the end you never know how much time it actually is going to take or is left.

First, let us have a look at scan times when scanning 35mm slides. Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II at 2820dpi and 16–bit colour output:

Digital ICE	Multiple scanning	Scan time
NO	NO	36 seconds
YES	NO	58 seconds
YES	4X	2 minutes 34 seconds
YES	8X	5 minutes
YES	16X	10 minutes 58 seconds

Epson Perfection 4990 PHOTO at 2400dpi and 16–bit colour output (with unsharp mask, grain reduction, and colour restoration off):

Digital ICE	Multiple scanning	Scan time
NO	N/A	6 minutes 52 seconds
YES	N/A	17 minutes 28 seconds

As you can see from the tables above, where the old Minolta takes 36 seconds the new Epson requires almost seven minutes; likewise, where the lowly Minolta needs only 58 seconds, the supposedly great Epson devours over 17 minutes (and that is at a slightly lower resolution).

When scanning bigger film formats scan times get even more ridiculous—here are some examples (all for 6X6 film, 16–bit colour output, with unsharp mask, grain reduction and colour restoration off):

Resolution, dpi	Digital ICE	Scan time
1200	NO	15 minutes 32 seconds
1200	YES	21 minutes 16 seconds
2400	NO	36 minutes 25 seconds
2400	YES	1 hour 33 minutes (!)

On one occasion I tried scanning a 6X6 slide at 3200dpi with ICE on. I pressed the scan button, scanning process began and the software estimated that it would take 70 minutes. Upon that I went out and coming back exactly two hours later I found the software showing that remaining time was... 86 minutes. I never found out how long scanning at this resolution takes as it is not fun waiting on your scanner for at least three hours. This sluggishness, however, turned out to be of no importance because as you will see below the scanner is unable to extract any real detail at this resolution.

The numbers above and my experience suggest that scanning film larger than 35mm at resolutions of over 1200dpi is utterly impractical unless you have only a couple of slides to scan and plenty of time to kill. Scanning 6X6 slides at 1200dpi produces roughly 2650 pixels in either horizontal or vertical dimension. This is enough for Internet, email and... 22cmX22cm prints. Does anyone really shoot medium format film to make prints of this size?

Resolution

First off, I wanted to see whether the Epson's impressive–on–paper resolution of 4800dpi would eclipse the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II. To make a comprehensive conclusion whether this was the case I decided to check it in the following ways: first, I wanted to see how the scans would compare at an equal resolution approaching Minolta's maximum of 2820dpi; second, I wished to examine how much more detail, if any, the Epson 4990 would extract at its maximum resolution of 4800dpi.

The two scanners have different resolution settings (the setting on Epson closest to Minolta's maximum resolution is 2400dpi) and in the first test I chose to downsize Minolta scan to make the scans comparable in size. In the second test I decided to upres Minolta scan to match Epson's 4800dpi. Note that in doing so I put the Minolta scan at a disadvantage. Following this procedure I scanned the 35mm slide above and examined the part of the image marked in red. Quite honestly, I expected the Epson to win hands down but the result was exactly the opposite—see below.


	Detail 1		Detail 2

Detail 1: scanned with the Epson 4990 at 2400dpi, 100% crop; detail 2: scanned with the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II at 2820dpi and downsized to match the size of the Epson scan on the left, 100% crop. In both instances the same amount of sharpening was applied (amount: 200%, radius: 0.3 pixels; threshold: 1 level). Obviously, the Minolta scanner is much more capable of extracting subtle detail from slides.


	Detail 3		Detail 4

Detail 3: scanned with Epson 4990 at 4800dpi (boy, did this take a long time!), 100% crop; detail 4: scanned with Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II at 2820dpi and upressed to match the size of the Epson scan on the left, 100% crop. In both instances the same amount of sharpening was applied (amount: 150%, radius: 1 pixels; threshold: 1 level). Now, what I see here is really interesting and surprising—the Minolta at 2820dpi actually extracts significantly more detail than the Epson at 4800dpi!

The above results lead me to conclude that the Epson 4990 is unable to extract any real detail from somewhere under 2400dpi on. This, basically, leaves us with only two possible realistic maximum resolutions—1200 and 2400dpi. I further conducted the following test to see if there is any real difference in detail extraction between the two: first scan the 6X6 image above at 2400dpi, then scan it again at 1200dpi and upres the file to match the size of the 2400dpi scan. As you know, upressing simply increases image size without producing/adding any additional detail. So in theory, the 2400dpi scan should be sharper than the upressed 1200dpi scan. The images below are the part of the picture above marked in red:


	Detail 5		Detail 6

Detail 5: scanned with Epson 4990 at 2400dpi, 100% crop; detail 6: scanned with Epson 4990 at 1200dpi and upressed to match the size of the 2400dpi scan on the left, 100% crop. In both instances the same amount of sharpening was applied (amount: 150%, radius: 1 pixels; threshold: 1 level; I intentionally applied a somewhat excessive amount of sharpening to verify quality of the data in the files). What I see here is that the 2400dpi scan is a tiny bit sharper; however, this is significantly emphasized by the excessive sharpening and almost invisible when sharpening is not applied. What it does indicate, though, is that the 2400dpi scan has pixels of better quality.

Conclusions

If we combine scan times and resolution performance, I find that the maximum meaningful and usable in practice resolution of the Epson 4990 is 1200dpi; at 2400dpi the scanner does extract a little bit more detail but at the price of ridiculously slow scanning; 4800dpi is pure marketing hype. 1200dpi probably suffices for larger film formats and the scanner might be the only realistic option for large format photographers. However, the Epson 4990 does not quite cut it for 35mm (clearly outperformed by the "lowly" Minolta scanner in all aspects) and 6X6 film—unless, of course, all you need is scanning slides for Internet and email, for which even 800dpi is plenty. I have to say that all this makes me very curious about what I view as overly optimistic reviews of the scanner on the Internet.

On paper, the 4990 appears able to replace dedicated film scanners; in reality, however, a flatbed scanner remains a flatbed scanner—its performance is nowhere near that of dedicated film scanners—even some old ones. Buying the Minolta and the Epson scanners cost me roughly USD1200. It is clear to me now that I should have bought a dedicated medium format film scanner right from the start, which once again confirms that photography is a very costly hobby and it gets even more expensive if you try to save money by buying cheaper equipment.

Update

Several readers have written questioning the scan times above; also, some Internet sources suggest that the scanner's performance immensely depends on the hardware resources of the computer in use. Due to these reasons, I further tested the Epson 4990 on a 1.42 GHz PowerPC Mac G4 with 1GB of RAM. This, of course, is not the fastest dog on the block but, as far as the "average" amateur photographer is concerned, I would consider this a pretty decent setup for personal computing. To once again cut to the chase, the following are new times scanning a 6X6 transparency (no multiple scanning; 16-bit colour output with unsharp mask, grain reduction and colour restoration off):

Resolution, dpi	Digital ICE	Scan time
1200	NO	54 seconds
1200	YES	5 minutes 32 seconds
2400	NO	1 minute 55 seconds
2400	YES	37 minutes 43 seconds

As you can see, scan time results have improved drastically, which indicates that they do indeed massively depend on how fast your computer is and how much RAM it has. This, in my view, has the following implications:

If you own a relatively old computer with not too much RAM and buy this scanner you then will have to either upgrade your computer or live with the very slow scan times;
If you own a decent computer (i.e. roughly equivalent to the one mentioned above or better) then scan times are acceptable (for not too prolific photographers, that is);
Keeping in mind that resolution performance, of course, does not depend on computer speed or RAM, as well as considering the fact that the scanner is still very slow at 2400dpi with ICE on, everything I wrote in the Conclusions part above remains valid.

Update 2

Talking about flatbed scanners in general, I received the following message from a reader in Spain:

I've just read your comments about the Epson 4990. I have bought a flatbed scanner (HP 4980) to scan some negatives and I ended up with the same conclusion as you. It's no way 4800 dpi. I was searching for some reviews about Epson scanners, since I was considering returning the HP and buying the Epson 3950, but after reading your review I guess I'm not buying that. Maybe you want to include a small note in your review about this scanner. I think people should be warned about this. I can send you a couple of scans, but I still don't have anything to compare with. The speed is not a problem with this scanner, though, it takes less than a minute to scan a negative at "4800 dpi".

Daniel.

Update 3

Another reader (Joerg Niggli) has suggested the following:

About the slow ICE scanning of the Epson 4990 I have found that it seems to be a problem of the Epson software. Using VueScan I get much faster scan times with Vuescan's IR–Option.

Update 4

Comments from another user of the HP4890:

Although I know the issue with dedicated scanners I have bought the HP4890. (...) I have put the unit to the test with the following results...

– I fully agree to your commentary on flatbeds on max. usable resolution of 1200dpi

– On hard underexposed slides that were a disaster (...) I managed to recover their detail by putting them directly on scanner bed. Day and night difference but avoid multi–scanning—for some reason successive scans do not overlap properly causing blur.

– I got much faster results of better or equal quality than the HP bundle with the VUESCAN.

M. Manetas