Oh man I hated silverfast from the first day. I bought it it came with Silverfast 8 plus something. I couldn't find any other good scanner just a plustek opticfilm 8200 for really cheap. And because I was dumb I sold my V370 before this.
#Epson perfection v700 upgrade
Recently I sold it because I had an oppurtinity to upgrade on a V550 but the seller was lost on the day when we wanted to meet. My first negative scanner was an Epson V370, I used it with epson scan and actually I loved it because it gave me a good quality for uploading it anywhere. (Also yeah, it's not the most interesting image, but it's what I had at the time) The Epson scanner was thoroughly cleaned on both sides of the scan glass before I scanned these. I'm using the stock holders, and the images look best at the (+) setting. So, the Epson scan is noticeably softer, and that's after I adjusted the focus on the filmstrip holder.
Same with sharpening - I use a very modest amount of sharpening in the scan software, about half of the "Less Auto Sharpness (-)" setting, which is extremely mild. I did use IR dust removal on both, because this is how I scan my images and I wanted to compare realistically. I've found that the Epson produces the same quality images anywhere from 4800 dpi all the way up to the interpolated 12800 dpi, but I wanted to reduce the amount of resizing that I'd have to do from the Plustek scan. Scans were done at 6400 dpi on the Epson, and 7200 dpi on the Plustek, reduced to the same pixel dimensions in Photoshop. This shot is on 35mm Fuji Provia 100F - and I know flatbeds usually don't quite have the quality to do 35mm really well, but since I'm comparing it to a 35mm scanner I'm stuck there. Some notes on the scanning: I'm using Silverfast 8 Ai for both scans, and both scanners were calibrated using the same single IT8 target. I'm pretty disappointed with the quality that I'm getting out of the Epson vs the Plustek. I've owned a Plustek scanner for awhile, picked one up to scan 4x5.