vincent_lau Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 Hi. I am relatively new to medium format. I use hasselblad mainly fro landscape and use slide 90% of time. I would like to buy a good scanner for 6X6 slides. I hope some of you can give me some advices on which scanner is good. I am also quite new to photoshops and also want some recommendation on photoshop soft-wares. Thanks V. Lau Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve_barnett2 Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 The Nikon 8000 is good, as is my Minolta Multi Pro. Heresay suggests the Nikon can have banding problems, and a narrow DOF, but I'm sure these are exaggerated. The Minolta on the other hand has disapointing software, with Vuescan working much better. Either will do justice to your Hassy transparencies. The industry standard for photo software is 'Photoshop 7'. There is a smaller version of this called 'Photoshop Elements', which is OK, but only just. If you are embarking on MF scanning, make sure you have a PC that is up to the task. A Firewire connection is favourite, 1 gig of RAM will deal with the large files you produce and run Photoshop, and a vast hard drive, at least 120 gigabyte will help store images. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nick roberts Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 The MultiPro with the latest Minolta software is a magnificent beast - and the Minolta software is far better for slides, IMO. Vuescan was a lot better for negs, but the latest Minolta software is better, IMO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_wilson2 Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 I had a Nikon 8000 which I returned because of banding and because the software was about stable as a squirrel on crank. The banding can be fixed by using "Super Fine" mode which causes the scanner to use only one line of its 3 line CCD. This also triples scan times. The software has supposedly also gotten much better since I had mine. A few caveats to my previous statements are that I had one of the first in the US, I was using the scanner on a dual cpu machine running W2K which is a combination Nikon later recommended against and some examples of the 8000 band much more frequently than others. The 8000 is capable of very good scans when everything is working correctly which is probably more often than not. I now have a Minolta Multi Pro with which I'm mostly happy with. It does seem to accenuate grain but Erik at www.scanhancer.com was very enterprising and experimented with diffusers to fix the problem. I have the diffuser and it works well most of the time. Overall I'd recommend the Minolta over the Nikon but both have their pros and cons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harvey_edelstein Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 Check out the Polaroid 120 is got great write-ups and its selling for about half as much as the Nikon. I read it resolves about 60lines/mm with very accurate colors. I think its guts are made by Microtek so there is more than one source of support for the product. Minolta was supposed to be comming out with a new model that could handle MF with more than 4000dpi up from their current 3200dpi, but I don't know if its is out yet or what it costs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_wilson2 Posted June 12, 2003 Share Posted June 12, 2003 The Polaroid is made by Microtek and it is a very good scanner. It doesn't have ICE which is a very worthwhile feature. As for a new Minolta scanner, they've announced (and are starting to ship) a 5400 dpi scanner but it only does 35mm. The Multi Pro does 4800dpi for 35mm and 3200 for MF which is plenty imo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gavin martin Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 What's the big issue with ICE. Get a can of air & spray the negative clean before you scan it. Then you can spot the scan in photoshop with the cloning tool in minutes if there is any dust left on. soooo much simpler & it seems it will improve the scan time by a fair bit too. Gavin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
donald_hutton Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 Until you've had ICE, you will not realize it's value. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perry_cas Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 Depends on your wallet really. there are two flat bed scanners on the market the epson and the canon that are reputed to do a good job with MF, The canon said to have good hardware, although the epson seems to have the edge on software as it has a silverscan software bundled into it. I have heard tell of an oder Nikon but I think its a 35mm the Nikon LS-3510AS. it is said to have amazing resolution. Other than that you go to a very expensive Nikon. As for P'shop. Well if you havent started yet a whole world of 'experience' awaits for you. It's vast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul_wilson2 Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 Like Donald said, until you've used it you won't realize the value. Maybe my Photoshop skills aren't up to snuff but spotting sucks IMO. Also, an air can and brush doesn't always get everything. I should probably yell at my lab but I see a fair bit of development gunk left behind and ICE takes care of that too. ICE does slow down the scan times but the Multi Pro (when used from within Photoshop) is quite fast. I tried the SS120 for a few days and I think the Minolta is just as fast even with ICE on. Multisampling slows things down a lot more. The SS120 is a very good scanner but I'd miss ICE. To each their own. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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