The v850 comes with a full duplicate set of negative holders so you can streamline your workflow a bit and have up to 6 strips of 35mm or two strips of 120 mounted and ready to go at any one time. I find it’s easy for the sliders to get knocked out of position though, especially on the 35mm holder which has a lot of them, so attention needs to paid that none have drifted when swapping negatives. These make a subtle change to the sharpness of your scans, slightly improving things when fine tuned. The film holders all have height adjustment sliders to fine tune the focus. The film holders are slightly more substantial than the 600’s and all have ANR (Anti-Newton Ring) glass inserts to help hold the film flat while avoiding those pesky newton rings that can occur when the film isn’t perfectly flat and reflections cause interference patterns. A neat little translucent strip in the lid houses a blue LED that shows the progress of the transparency unit’s light across the negative which is rather a fun detail. HardwareĬompared to the V600, the V850 is an absolute unit with a very large boxy design. That resolution is very much the upper end of what you can expect with a high end flatbed, but with some careful post processing you can get close enough. For me the bare minimum acceptable resolution for making up to A3 size prints and looking nice on a high DPI monitor is about 12 megapixels, this needs a resolution of approaching 3000 DPI to achieve with a 35mm frame. You have to accept with a flatbed scanner you’re never going to get the full resolution of the film and the smaller the negative size the more this impacts. This boasts increased resolution and a large negative scanning area capable of handling up to 3 strips of 35mm film and the ability to even do up to 8×10 if ever the madness truly takes me. Well those options are incredibly limited, so I ended up dumping a bunch of cash on an Epson V850, Epson’s high end flatbed. A little over a year ago now I decided that I quite liked this whole “scan a bunch of images in a batch” workflow and decided to look for something that would also handle 35mm in reasonable quality.

When last I wrote on these hallowed pixels (that’s been awhile, my apologies), I was talking about scanning medium format film with an Epson V600.

Vuescan epson v600