silverfast vs. vuescan

magicbastarder

anyone any opinions?

i'm very much in two minds about upgrading my scanner (currently have a canoscan 9900f) to an epson perfection V500 or V700. i have to replace my computer, but a car, etc. etc., and these things have an annoying habit of eating into my shekels.
however, very much the weak link on the canon is the bundled software. it's so bad it's actually surprising, for a company so embedded in the digital imaging market. sample scans below.
does vuescan offer the same benefits as silverfast? is silverfast AI worth the extra money? and if i do change scanners, how easily can i switch the silverfast software to a new scanner?

also, one thing which is worth considering is that silverfast does not appear to be win7 compatible for the 9900f, and i've to buy a new computer soon.

canon:



silverfast:



and a 100% crop (scanned at 1600dpi)
canon:
http://stroma.org/kevin/links/canon2.jpg
silverfast:
http://stroma.org/kevin/links/sf2.jpg

oddly, the silverfast scan is of noticeably higher quality, despite being *much* quicker to execute.

DaireQuinlan

I use vuescan exclusively nowadays, tried silverfast and wasn't really a fan. From other peoples experiences though I reckon you can do pretty much the same stuff with either of them, so pick either of the rather esoteric interfaces that you hate the least and just get used to it :-)

Vuescan has a couple of advantages though. I use mine for my canonscan and for my nikon. AFAIK you have to buy a new license for SF for each scanner you want to use with it. VS is also cheaper for the equivalent functionality, and if you get the pro license you can just keep on upgrading for ever. Plus Ed Hamrick i pretty snappy generally with replies to support requests or issues you discover with the software. There's a new version seemingly every month or so.

Vuescans big weakness that other people have complained about is its lack of up to date film profiles, SF has them I think I remember reading. That makes colour balancing negatives occasionally tricky. I never use the profiles anyway, I scan to raw 64bit RGBI negative, then process to a 48bit RGB un-colour-corrected positive in VS, then do the rest of the colour adjustment elsewhere.

And yeah, no hardware manufacturer should be allowed write the software that comes with their gear. Shockingly bad for the most part.

magicbastarder

i suspect the issue with the OS compatibility is the scanner driver rather than the scanning software.

must get a demo vuescan install. i have the silverfast AI demo, which in some ways is unnecessarily complicated.

magicbastarder

actually, i'll wait till a night when i'm not trying out a new whiskey, my senses are slightly impaired.