Digital BW, The Print

At 08:35 AM Sunday 2/4/2007, you wrote:
>Minolta was mentioned. The 5400 was a great, slow, reasonably reliable
>, honest machine: the Nikon-fast 5400II was fragile, junk inside, and
>a reason Minolta deserved to be run out of the business. I owned two,
>replacing them with a much-superior Nikon V (same speed, same image
>quality, built like a truck, better film flatness than either Minolta
>model).

I have the Minolta SE5400 - great resolution, but terrible depth of field. I have images - many images - that are always soft in some area, the grain unfocussed - due to the shallow depth of field. Apparently the higher the resolution, the lower the depth of field.

But you can get good A2 prints out of the scans - and I've had grainless A2 prints from Tech Pan (extraordinary film) scanned with this machine. I agree that the Nikon's probably overall a better bet unless you can get a good 5400 second-hand.

Richard

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