On Jan 14, 2006, at 4:51 AM, Pål Jensen wrote:
The MF film holder is close to useless - you need the glass holder which incidentally cost a fortune and must be the most profitable item in the history of manufactured goods.
I'm amazed that they didn't supply a glass holder. My Minolta MF scanner did, and it's even built pretty well. I'd rather not use it but my MF sized Scanhancer (a 3rd-party grain diffuser accessory) doesn't fit the glassless holder so I'm having to do the best I can to avoid Newton rings.
The highlight/shadow adjustment functions are excellent. However, it creates artifacts. Anyway to minimize or remove these?
I found with my scanner driver that it's best to leave adjustments for Photoshop. Just set the Exposure to maximise the brightness while preserving the highlights - the image will end up a bit dark overall but that can be quickly taken care of in PS with a better result than the scanner driver will give. Oversampling can be very effective at reducing shadow noise so I'd encourage experimentation with different settings (I use 4x; 16x takes ages and makes very little difference even after extreme adjustments).
The main problem: Grain removal function (digital GEM) do not work with Medium Format (work well with 35mm). I get an error message when using this function when scanning (preview works) saying "There was an error performing a post processing" (sounds like a software problem). Is this normal (theres nothing in the manual saying it doesn't work with MF)?
I'm surprised about that but I see from your other post that you found a possible solution.
GEM on my scanner is a real pain but I don't need it with the Scanhancer. I do use dICE but that doesn't work nearly as well for MF (this may be due to the glass holder). For 35mm it's a huge time saver. For 6x7 I don't want to try turning it off after seeing what it leaves behind :)
The scan itself does take a little while by the time I add oversampling and dICE, maybe 10-15 minutes but I spend that much again on preparation, perhaps more with 6x7 because of the extra fiddling involved with the glass holder, and the fact that prescans take a bit longer.
The only weird problem I've found is that I can't scan a 6x7 slide at 1600ppi. Partway through the scan it just stops and the driver hangs. I fixed that problem by doing my low-res scan at 1200ppi instead (I do a smaller scan at half-res as a colour reference because the Scanhancer introduces a slight cast... the Match Color tool in Photoshop is fantastic if used with care).
- Dave
