Frontier scans versus Minolta Dual Scan IV scans

[josphy]

I've been scanning my film on a Frontier machine (at the photo lab

where I work), and I've actually been very satisfied with the

results. I can go up to 3000x4500 on the Frontier, and I'm

realizing this is probably as much as I'd ever want from 35mm film.

 

So now I have my eye on the Minolta Scan Dual IV -- would be nice to

be able to do my scans at home at my leisure --and I'm wondering if

we assume the ability/know-how of the operator to be equal, can I

get at least as good of results out of the Scan Dual IV as I do out

of the Frontier machine?

 

Some of the features of the Scan Dual seem like they would be a big

improvement -- such as the ability for multisampling , as my

Frontier scans are sometimes a little noisy.

[bernard_bennett]

The highest resolution you can get from the ScanDual is 3200ppi.

I do my scanning at this level, and set the parameters to 4200x2800;

this does a very small crop of the actual 35mm frame.

If scanned at 16 bit level the resulting tiff file is some 60+mb, so you need plenty of room on the hard disc!

Multisampling does reduce the noise somewhat but scan times increase considerably. I do my noise reduction in PicWindowPro using the advance sharpen feature which does noise reduction, speck removal, and sharpening with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Hope this helps.