On Sun, 19 Sep 2004, Terry and Tracey wrote:
>
> Thanks guys for responding. I'll buy the Minolta soon. Better that than
> putting towards the kids education or a house.....
>
> I've got the older multi-pro (4800 dpi). The 5400 incorporated a copy of a
> diffuser that a couple multipro users developed (scanhancer). The multipro
> works fine with Kodachrome. I've heard the Minolta software doesn't work
> that well with negative film. I only use slides.
>
I have both the dual scan IV and the scan elite 5400
I have scaned about 20 rolls of fuji sensia through the dual scan IV and
was not that impressed. However, some of this has to be explained by the
limitations of the film (cheap) and the nature of negative film. My main
complaints where
1. dust and scraches showing up a lot ( the dual scan has no infra red
channel) and its very difficult not to cause minor scratches when removing
and inserting negative film from the plastic sleeves... Slides have an
advantage in this respect.
2. Difficulty in getting the right colours. This seems to be the problem
of calculating the brown film base colour correctly. This is compounded by
the fact vuescan has no setting for sensia only reala.
3. photo shop elements does not support 48bit colour and I prefer edditing
with all the colour information and bandwidth I can. In 24 bit colour you
only have to alter things a little before the colours go crazy.
4. lack of sharpness and grain this seems inherent in print
film and much less of a problem with slide. Which is one of the reasons I
have converted a few month ago to slide.
5. light white skys have streaks in them. THIS is a problem with the
dual scan IV scanner. If you scan pure white its streaky and pure black is
noisy The streaks match the direction of the scanning and seem to be that the
ccd elements are not of equal sensitivity. calibration is supposed to
solve this problem but it seems to have little effect. This shows up in
large areas of near white.
I have only used the 5400 for slides. Colour ballance is good, to the
point where I don't feel I need to play with it much. But slides are
designed to be viewed with a light source and negatives are designed
to be printed and often the printer applies colour correction.
Random noise in white and black is *much* lower and streaking is almost gone.
The IR
channel works reasonably well although it can blur bright spot lamps and
other small dots of bright colour.
If you can wait a while I will scan a few negative shoots on the 5400 and
dual scan and compare them
Regards
JAmes
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