pwcc

[D. Bergin]

I have an Epson V700, which cost a lot of dough IMO and is CCD based.

I constantly have to adjust in Professional mode to try and make items look as close to realistic as possible, depending on what is being scanned.

I'm not talking brightness and contrast and such........I'm not touching those features unless it's something that legitimately needs to be touched up for non-auction/selling reasons.

I'm talking the Sharpness and Descreen features, and the levels those features are set at. A newspaper is scanned differently from a magazine which is scanned differently from a lithograph which is scanned differently from a real photo.

Sometimes on older photos with off-white borders or backs you have to disable the automatic brightness that gets implemented on the initial pre-scan because it makes it too bright and exaggerated, sometimes it comes out closer to reality and you keep it.

On many printed style baseball cards, postcards or magazines, you have to implement the descreen into magazine setting in order to keep the cross-hatch or dot patterns from over-whelming the scan, and then you have to implement the sharpness setting at the same time, in order to keep the descreen setting from dulling down the card/item too much.

A few other things, you should always be scanning in photo mode and not document mode. You should also be disabling such features as dust removal and color adjustment at all times, unless it's something not related to re-selling something.

I'm sure a lot of these large ebay consignment auction houses have several different people scanning with several different scanners, using several types of settings, and this is a reason for several of the differences you see.

Maybe I'm rambling but I hope this makes some sort of sense to somebody. Maybe I'm just worrying too much about it.