Recommended scanner for slide/negative scanning?

[Erik Nørgaard]

Hi,

I want to buy a scanner, as I see from the documentation, it's supported 
if it's supported by some SANE backend. However, I would appreciate some 
hands-on experience or recomendation.

It will be used mainly for negative scanning, but a dedicated negative 
scanner is too expensive. I'd like to scan my 35mm in 2000x3000 
resolution, and the dpi doesn't tell me much as how this converts to pixels.

I've been looking at Epson 2480/2580 and Canon CanoScan 4200F/5200F. 
According to the SANE project homepage the latest stable is 1.0.13, but 
the ports version is 1.0.15.

For the stable version, SANE reports basic/minimal support for the Epson 
scanners and unsupported for the Canon scanners. For the CVS version, 
SANE reports unsupported for the Canon scanners but good/basic for the 
Epson. Can anyone confirm me how well the Epson scanners are supported?
When SANE reports unsupported, they add "probably unsupported", have 
anyone tried these scanners?

Second, there has been a bug report on the debian site regarding a fried 
Epson 2480:

http://alioth.debian.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=410366&aid=301692&group_id=30186

Can anyone confirm if this is indeed SANE and/or if the problem has been 
resolved?

Finally, getting exotic :-) does any of these scanners handle medium 
format (6x6cm)?

Thanks, Erik

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