canoscan 9950 color calibration problems

I acquired the 9950F since I was appealed by its versatility that matches my film equipment I use.

Overall I am pretty satisfied with the product and I didn't experience some horror stories listed in

this forum. I have however some troubles and I did not find good answers on the forum.<br>

I work on machintosh, with a good CRT which is calibrated with 1.8 gamma, that is standard

macintosh. I use preferrably scangear in expert mode since it works rpetty well and recognises the

various film holders, Silverscan furthermore has torubles scanning at 4800 dpi, where it introduces

noticeable banding and artefacts which do not appear in scangear.

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Scans are way too dark. I need to act on the gamma setting by often 0.3 or even 0.4 to get a

decent result. I compared to labscan and a general appearance against a traditional print. This is

very noticeable with slides, where the result is almost unusable, but with negatives and prints it

exists too. This is true when using the recommented color calibration, with or without auto tone

and by using color matching by profiles. Auto tone may be correct with some pictures, but I speak

on average on several dozens scans I made. I verified this also when scanning just the Kodak

greyscale ruler, where the last zones merge hopelessly if I don't correct the gamma (checked also

using the value inspector, it is not my monitor). It looks almost as if it would ignore that I work on

a mac and use a 2.2 gamma, which, still, would result dark but not so extreme.

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The scanner seems to have a magenta biasing when scanning slides (and a greenish cast when

using negatives). I read that it happens to others too. I have difficulties correcting this in scangear.

When scanning high-quality, brilliant velvia slides of outdoor lanscapes I am unable to get vibrant

greens as the original has (and compared to some cheap scans I had done at my local lab too).

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The best solution I suppose would be to have better profiles for the scanner. I currently see in the

options the canoscan negative/positive/slide and the kodak photocd profiles. Someone has maybe

better profiles specific for this scanner? Or in any case other profiles to try? How could I generate

these profiles?

My experience with the 9950F (and before the 8000F):<br>

Use Vuescan, its cheap and does a lot more than the Canon software, with vuescan the 9950F is able to do single pass multisampling and a long exposure pass, bringing more detail and less noise in the shadows.<br>

Dont scan with 4800 DPI, there is no difference to 2400 DPI.<br>

Dont do any color and gamma correction in the scan software, do it all together in Photoshop, best results brings the use of dedicated plugins like Alien Skin Exposure<br>

Regards<br>

Martin