i've been looking at scanners for the past two months or so...my loyalty
to olympus (and the incredibly low price) had me leaning toward the es-10,
but i finally decided on the minolta dimage dual for a number of reasons.
first was native resolution...the minolta's resolution was 2438dpi, while
the es-10's is a "measly" 1700 or so.
second was footprint...the minolta's film carrier is inserted from the
front, while the olympus moves the film from side to side, requiring
more space on the desktop.
third was, believe it or not, price. while the minolta was about $80
more expensive, it came with a $50 rebate, which brought it back into
the same ballpark.
finally there was the software. the olympus comes with (i believe)
photodeluxe 2.0. the minolta is now shipping with photoshop LE, which
i much preferred. in addition, photoshop LE is upgradeable to a full
copy of photoshop (i know: PAY for software? what a radical concept!)
for a fairly reasonable price. the cost of the scanner and photoshop
turned out to be only $100 over the cost of photoshop alone!
of course, nothing is perfect. the scanner has a few annoying quirks,
but what doesn't?
> The ES-10 software is delivered with configuration files for a number
> of film brands and types. What really eats me is that the information
> is not used! Film parameters are hard-coded into the program instead
> of being read from the files. Sigh!
i'd love to see a feature like this in minolta's driver...i can choose
between "35mm color negative", "35mm color positive", etc. after i've
made adjustments to the color (and i almost always have to for negatives)
i can save the settings, but can NOT get it to use those settings again
without explicitly loading them FOR EACH NEGATIVE TO BE SCANNED!
> Add to that, configuration of exposure and contrast can not be saved
> to a file, so you have to begin adjustment from scratch every time.
> The ES-10 software for MS-Windows is not up to the standard I would
> expect from a professional firm, sorry to say.
the minolta has a number of means to adjust exposure. if you want to
take the coward's way out, they have a simple brightness/contrast
matrix to adjust things...it shows you a 3x3 matrix of previews of various
brightness/contrast levels, with the current settings in the center.
when you choose one of the previews, *it* moves to the center, and it
readjusts the matrix surrounding it. there's also a simple colorwheel
to make adjustments to the color. at any time, you can see the original
preview and the adjusted preview side-by-side at full screen size, to
make a more careful assessment.
for slightly more control, there is a histogram tool, which allows
adjustment of high, low, and midpoint values for each color separately.
for absolute control, there are curves which can also be adjusted
separately.
once you've got a set of adjustments that work for you, you can save
them and then reload them for succeeding scans...you just can't load
the adjustments automatically at the beginning of a scan session. it
would be nice to have a set of color corrections for, say "kodak gold
100", and choose that at the beginning of scanning, so i wouldn't have
to load it for EACH AND EVERY SHOT! (can you tell this bugs me?)
other than these relatively minor problems with the software,
it is quite easy to use and the results seem very nice. scans take
anywhere from 40 seconds to slightly longer than a minute, depending
on resolution. the only interface available is SCSI. i believe there
are two versions of the scanner: one with a SCSI card, and one
without. since i have a mac, i got the (cheaper) "without" version.
there were no problems integrating it into my SCSI chain...i just set
the ID, removed termination from the flatbed scanner that was previously
the end of the chain, and turned termination "on" on the minolta.
if you're putting this on a PC, i've heard that it only works with a
specific range of SCSI cards...there is a list of them included with
the software. (if anyone's thinking of buying this scanner and would
like the list, let me know.)
--
| Napoleon wore a black hat
joe jackson | Ate lots of chicken
e3ujxj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx | And conquered half Europe
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