Digital BW, The Print

I've had time to try the scanner some more now, and here's some further
thoughts:

- The grain dissolver has a small but noticable effect on most films. It
has the strongest effect on color slide film, and the weakest effect on
BW negative films. I still find it worth using, since it smooths out the
grain just a little bit. Scanning times increase with this switched on.
When using ICE the grain dissolver is mandatory and always switched on.

- With ICE and color films the scannig times can be _really_ long. I
measured 14 minutes for one color negative. That was at 5400dpi with ICE
and the grain dissolver switched on. It's worth noting that a 5400dpi
scan is almost exactly double the file-size of a 4000dpi scan, so longer
scan times should be expected I guess. Still, 14 minutes is a long time
to wait... Fortunately I do BW scans 95% of the time, and those always
come in at less than 2 minutes.

- I have some underexposed Kodak HIE negatives (exposed at ISO 50 when I
should have used 400) that my previous Canon scanner had some serious
problems with. The Canon software simply couldn't scan them, and with
Vuescan I managed to rescue the images by increasing the exposure to
very high values. The Minolta scanned them without any problems at all,
just like any other negative.

- The scanner software can run as a separate application and scan
directly to files. This is really nice as I can work in Photoshop on one
image while another is scanning. I honestly can't imagine why I would
use Vuescan anymore. It's a nice application, but the Minolta software
has a much better interface and does everything I need.

- Is 5400dpi worth it? Maybe... With TMAX100 and Supra100 films I feel I
can see some more detail at 5400dpi than 4000. A BW scan at 5400dpi is
70mb for 16bits BW and 230mb for 16bit color, so I resample down to
4000dpi if the scans aren't exceptionally sharp in the first place.

- The image quality is great. I don't really notice much difference from
a good scan with my previous Canon, except for the higher resolution of
course. The work required to get a good scan is much less however, and
that makes it worth it for me.

--
Daniel Staver
http://daniel.staver.no