marek_gorecki1

Kathryn,

Always turn off the camera if you don't take pictures.

If I keep my EOS cameras on it will dry a battery in couple of days, otherwise will allow me to making about 40 films from a new (123)battery.

Gerry is right to make good picture using IS requires practice and practice.

I use Canon EOS 3 and 300mm/f4 IS lens with 1.4x or 2x extender for my birds and animals pictures. I like to make action pictures of birds or animals.

In this case IS doesn't help. I tried to use panning with 1/125 or 1/60 but I got always blurred pictures.

The best results I got is IS off, the shutter speed (for 300mm + 1.4x) from 1/200 - 1/500. Shorter time frizzes all motions.

I don't use any support, all shots are from my hands. Of course making one good picture takes 10 or more error frames.

IS really helps but only for static pictures any motion except panning (if available).

There is an example of panning (1/125 IS 2 - picture is not very sharp).<div></div>

Hello,

I have 2 scanners Minolta 5400 and Coolscan 5000.

Looks that Nikon scanner has better mechanical quality but 5400 has far better output. Nikon's real scan resolution is about 3600, Minolta's about 5000 even more. It makes a big difference for prints.

Nikon crops only part of the film frame - lose about 10% of the frame.

Minolta crops full frame of the film.

In the past I have tested my old Minolta Scan Speed 2700 v. Coolscan 4000. I was able to get the same tonality (in the shadows and light areas of my slides or negatives). 5400 v. 5000 is a deep difference. Minolta has much better D max and sharpness. I did scan about 10,000 slides (9000 for index pic. 1000 max res.) and 2000 negs. on my 5400 and 3000 using my Nikon. Finally I decided to keep my Nikon as a backup. For index pictures (small images) Nikon is good but not very. If I scan on Nikon 5000 very well exposed Velvia slide and use all available tools the output looks not very good. Minolta gives better output from well exposed slides or negatives. In both scanners I use vuescan for index pictures and original software for the max. resolution.

In my opinion the best B&W film for scanning is T-MAX 100 and 400.

Anyway I get very good scans on my Minolta 5400 from B&W negs using Vuescan (the fastest and very good software I ever tried). For index pictures I set 1340 dpi. All fixes I do on Photoshop, like grain reduction, contrast adjustment, sharpening etc. (ICE doesn't work for B&W). I see that pixellation problem and poor range of tones you got is related to the low resolution or quality of the jpeg output you set up. Do not think about Silverfast - very expensive & slow. For pictures I want to print I use Minolta's software - is excellent.

I have tested Nikon ls-5000 vs. Minolta 5400. Finally after scanning about 5000 slides (for my index pictures) and 200 TIF pictures with resolution 5400dpi for printing I would say that 5400 is the winner (real resolution of the Nikon LS-5000 is much lower that Minolta 5400. It makes very big different for enlargements, also Minolta gives much better tonality in the shadows and bright parts of the picture.

Marek