Pros and Cons of ICE

[stradibarrius]

What are the pros and cons of digital ICE?
I have have an Epson V500

[pellicle]

I've only ever been happy with ICE on my Nikon scanners, slows my Epson down to buggery and introduces some occasional funky artifacts in the fine detail.

If I could get something like the LS-4000 which scanned 4x5 I'd be rapped!

[note: this meaning

rap 2 (rp)
tr.v. rapt or rapped (rpt), rap·ping, raps Archaic
1. past participle rapt To enchant or seize with rapture.
2. To snatch.

]

[stradibarrius]

After I asked the question earlier this morning I scanned some negatives from the film I processed last night. I decided to try the "ICE" and see what happened. As I was looking over the image removing dust specs I notice these crazy artifacts! Then I realized why "ICE" may not be so good???

[Tony-S]

The ICE on my V500 is pretty much useless. Clearly I don't know how to use it...

[cooltouch]

I don't use ICE with my Epson scanners, neither do I use the Dust Removal feature. I've found ICE reduces sharpness without significantly removing dust or scratches in any way, and the Dust Removal feature adds strange artifacts to my scans -- they look like slivers of glass . . . or ice, come to think of it.

[PVia]

There's no way around digi-spotting if you want high quality scans...make sure you get the best, cleanest scan possible whether that means dust-brushes, cleaning glass with microfibre cloth, wet-mounting...whatever works for you.

[pellicle]

Folks

I suspect that the problems lie in the difficulty of mapping the IR channel to the other channels. Epson clearly has a problem with this even mapping the R G and B which are on the same physical scanhead. If you look at my article here you can see that at a pixel level the Epson can't get it exactly right.

As Nikon scanners don't seem to have this problem (neither the mapping problems or the ice artifacts) I suspect that this is the source of the problem.

[R Shaffer]

I don't use ICE or dust removal on my epson 4990. Tried once and it was soooo slow. If I do a careful job of dusting off the neg and cleaning the scanner glass it's not much effort to spot the digital image.

[OldBikerPete]

I have used digital dust etc. removal (briefly) on both Canon and Epson scanners. As long as you don't want to print too large, it sort of works - the artifacts it creates are too small to be easily seen.
I scan 5x4 negs. and print them BIG - up to 8x and I have never founf any form of digital blemish removal to be satisfactory.
I now scan as clean as I can get then (after contrast, brightness and sharpness treatments) choose 'view actual pixels' and 'healing tool' in photoshop and spend at least a couple of hours spotting each image. After all, you only have to do it once for each image.

[mrred]

How good ICE is seems to depend on the implementer. ICE with epson scan is moderately ok, with SilverFast is kinda screwy, and with Vuescan is about the best.

The reality is the ICE can only detect the dust/scratches. It's the software that repairs the damage. Like everything else, software can be good or bad. Autopilot can only do so much. Ultimately it's up to you if you want to do the repair or the machine.

I would much rather that ICE just show me where the damage is and let me do the healing, as I can be more intuative about it.