Hi Dave, On Sun, 30 Jun 2002 17:38:40 +1200, David A. Mann wrote:
> Overall they seem to be a very good scanner for the price. > Has anyone here had experience with these scanners? I've been using one for a couple of months. It's attached via USB to a 733 MHz Pentium III with IDE drives and Win 98 SE. I've scanned around 50 rolls (60% 24 exposure) at 250-1000 dpi for contacts and previews, and about 150 frames at 4000 dpi. After installing the scanner and driver, immediately check the Canon web site for updates. I had some problems with (_very_ large) memory leaks in the version on the CD. They're better with the last update I installed (1.0.3) is better, but still seems to have some leaks. It could be Photoshop 6, though, too. Or the combination of them. Or ... who knows ... but it's a PITA. I have to shut down Photoshop every so often because it reports that it doesn't have enough memory to complete the scan. Then I wait a few seconds and start it back up and it's happy again, for a while. Unfortunately, it doesn't figure out that it's out of memory until you've waited for the entire scan-and-FARE cycle. :-( Scanning at 4000 dpi with 48-bit color, the output images are about 135MB if you don't crop down to just the frame boundaries, and about 125MB if you do. Scanning an entire six-frame negative strip at 500 dpi and 42-bit color, with FARE enabled, takes less than five minutes. Make sure you've got at least 256MB of RAM in your system or you're going to do a lot of waiting. I'm maxed out at 512MB and it helps when you've got more than one image in memory, like batch scanning. 1GB is not too much if you want to batch scan all six frames in the negative carrier at once at full resolution. It can hold four slides in a different carrier, but I don't shoot slides, so I haven't tried it. It also comes with an APS adapter. That allows you to scan an entire roll of APS film at once. I hate to think how much memory that takes at full resolution. Scanning a frame at 4000 dpi, 42-bit color, with FARE (IR scratch/dust removal) enabled, will take around ten to fifteen minutes per frame. The vast majority of this time seems to be the actual scanning. It doesn't look like changing from USB to SCSI would help much, as a fraction of the total time. It seems like it might knock off fifteen to thirty seconds, but that seems to be about it. FARE works very well, but big scratches or hairs or things will cause it to fail. The bummer is that the driver doesn't detect the failure until after the entire scan is done, then it throws away the image due to the failure. Cleaning the negative and rescanning almost always works. Very occasionally you'll hit a frame that just won't scan with FARE enabled. It's happened twice so far to me, and only at full resolution. You've then wasted a half hour or so figuring that out, what with cleaning and retrying. Then you turn FARE off and scan it and fix the blasted thing in Photoshop. It's very frustrating, but it's also very rare. These operational problems are not enough to keep me from using the scanner, though the memory leaks can get me pretty frustrated sometimes. I've been very pleased with the image quality produced by the scanner and its driver. I rarely have to adjust color or contrast in Photoshop. I sometimes give it a little shot of USM, but it's tiny compared to what I was having to do with prints scanned at 300 to 600 dpi. Usually about 20% with 3 pixel radius and 3 in the other parameter (I forget what it is, threshold maybe). The biggest problem I'm having is what appears to be grain aliasing. It only happens at 4000 dpi, and I'm afraid the only real way to fix it is to go up or down in resolution. Some films are worse than others, but all of the Kodak I've tried so far exhibits the problem to varying degrees. That would be RG 100, RG 400, Portra 400 NC, Supra 100, and Supra 400. I've got some Fuji Superia 400 (4 layer) that I've shot, but not yet scanned. We'll see how that goes. I'm still trying to figure out a really good way to even it out after scanning. A bit of median filter helps a lot, and gives the USM a better image to work with, but it still leaves a bit to be desired. Applying enough median filter to complete smooth out the speckles also wipes out all of the detail that the 4000 dpi got you in the first place. I'm thinking of applying the median filter to the color layers individually. All suggestions welcome. This is a serious problem for me. If I can't find a combination of film, scanner settings, and post-processing to handle this, I'm going to have to find a different solution. TTYL, DougF KG4LMZ - 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 .
