I’ve been using the new scanner intensively the past week or so.  For the most part it has been great, but when it fails, it fails big time on the “Digital ICE” feature that is supposed to clean up old, possibly damaged photos, slides, negatives, etc.  Besides the problems with ultra rocky settings, it also seems to do odd stuff when there are a lot of leafy trees or rippled water shots.  It just over smooths those things and turns them into blocky, artifact filled pictures, which is unfortunate.  Of course, you can turn that feature off, but then you need to re-scan the image (which can take a long time if you’re using a high dpi setting – upwards of 3-5mins per picture).

Anyways, I’m still glad I got the scanner, and it really is performing pretty well.  It just an annoyance that when it fails, it does so in such a grand failure.  I’d say it’s failure rate is well within acceptable limits though.  Across a spectrum of many types of photos, it probably only conks out apprx. 5% of the time, or less.  But on those types of photos (lots of rocks with shadows, leafy-forest shots, rippled water…etc) it fails near 100%.

I hope the coming week finds you well, and that preparations for the upcoming holidays are on track! Enjoy!