First, I didn't say *better*, I said *very good*. Second, in many cases it is better. For instance, it allows multi-pass scanning with almost any supported scanners, even when OEM driver does not (e.g. Acer ScanWit, the older one, without Ice, its OEM driver was, pardon me, a piece of shit, and vuescan was the only way to extract any useful image out of all its noise)
Second, vuescan runs on most PC platforms. That was why I bought it: if you run Linux, that's pretty much the only game in town. Third, and probably, most importantly: it does not try to outsmart you. It tells you *exactly* what it is doing (e.g. where the focus point, what is the scan exposure, color mask, and so on...), so you are always in control. True, it is easy to shoot yourself in a leg with it. But, think Pentax MX vs IQZoom <G>. Besides, it allows you to save the raw scanner CCD data, so you can tweak it in Photoshop till you reach nirvana. Yes, including IR channel, if your scanner supports one. Maybe Silverscan is better. But considering bang for a buck, there's simply no competition in 3rd party software. Now, the Nikon's OEM driver is *very good* as well. I am split 50/50 between the two. If I scan an image that I know needs Ice/Gem tweaking, NikonScan is the one to run. If all I want to do is slightly adjust colors in Photoshop -- that's a job for Vuescan. Finally, my main point was that in reviews sometimes there's quite a bit of emphasis on which scanner has which driver and how usable it is. What I was trying to say is even if the OEM driver is horrible, it's not a reason to discard the scanner, since there's inexpensive 3rd party software that works just fine on pretty much anything with a CPU inside. Silverscan *is not* a competition, at the prices they ask. > From: Shel Belinkoff > Subject: Re: Film scanners? > Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 19:16:25 -0700 > > Why is Vuescan a better choice than most other programs, and, > seemingly, better, or more highly praised, than the factory software? > > Mishka wrote: > > > One more think: when you read the reviews, ignore *all* the talks > > about software. There's a VueScan program that runs pretty much all > > the scanners on most platforms (win32, linux, mac in all its > > incarnations) and it is *very good* (only $45 if I remember > > correctly) Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
