steven_clark

<p>The easy way to explain it is both of the Canon lens mounts were designed to take less space so you could fit an adapter for other lenses. As a result there isn't enough space to have an adapter for an FD mount lens on anything that has a mirror, without using another lens to fix the focus.</p>

<p>About the only reason not to stop down when adapting the lens to digital is to decrease depth of field to amplify out-of-focus areas.</p>

<p>It's easy enough to flip an image in post processing when scanning. Start with slick side up (mostly to reduce dust damage) and put it the other way only if it gives you a sharper image.</p>

<p>Are you scanning the negatives, scanning prints, or using scans of negatives provided by the lab? Keep in mind in both the second and third case you are at the mercy of the lab, who may often err on the side of attractive contrast over useful shadow detail.</p>

<p>Sounds like some debris or something in the calibration area at the top. When using an Epson transparency adapter the gap at the top of the film holders is used to calibrate the sensor and anything that blocks light there will throw off the rest of the scan.</p>

<p>Bulb flash tends to have a startup time and so need to be fired before the shutter even opens, or for the shutter to stay open long enough to catch them. cameras that natively support them have a separate sink speed that sets off the flashbulb before you open the shutter. This bulb sync can be used with a strobe to pre-energize objects that glow to catch the glow.</p>

<p>Macs and PC's are made from 99% identical hardware. The 1% difference is some very interesting stuff, but not really applicable for performance.</p>

<p>My guess is the actual exposure value is between the two shutter speeds. Try it in shutter priority and see if the difference is still a full stop. It kinda sounds like the plunger on the pin that indicates maximum aperture is a little sticky or something.</p>

<p>If you could find a Core i5 processor ending in HQ I suspect that would get you most of the performance for a little cheaper. Accordingly most manufacturers won't supply that option so I'd ignore it unless you bump into it.</p> <p>What you probably want is to ensure that your processor model number ends in that HQ instead of a U. A Core i7 U is a dual core hyperthreaded chip that would be a cheap Core i3 on a desktop. Anything ending in HQ is an actual quad core chip and potentially twice as powerful.</p> <p>Memory and hard disk are usually two of the easiest things to upgrade on a larger laptop. And manufacturers like to charge several times the market cost for upgrades to them. As a result you might want to mostly ignore the RAM amount given and just plan on buying an upgrade with help after market. About the only complication on storage is that the combination of a decent size SSD for the system and software and a big Hard Disk to store photos is really really nice. If you don't get a system with both installed there's no particular guarantee that the system will have 2 slots should you upgrade at a later date. There are a couple strategies for this, both involving SSDs in the same 2.5" SATA shape as a laptop hard disk:</p> <p>Just get a single big SSD, they're pretty cheap these days. There's a LOT of variation between models but anything is better than a hard disk. Maybe supplement with a big external Hard Disk or NAS when at home/job.</p> <p>Get a converter that lets you sacrifice your optical drive for an extra hard disk bay. Put the SSD in one slot and the hard disk in the other.</p> <p>A screen at greater than 1080p is really probably not all that useful. Sure you're close to the screen, but everything is so tiny you end up putting Windows in high-resolution display "zoom" mode just to make things legible, even on 1080p. That's not an issue here, but should it come up.</p> <p>Cetain brands are better than others at giving you card-format SSD slots even when you don't buy the SSD from them. I know from my current system MSI does it. The slots are called mSATA (older) or M.2 (newer). and if the computer has them you can get an SSD that fits, copy the system to the SSD, and wipe the old drive to use as storage.</p> <p>Don't get a really big graphics card, they use proportionally more power. Something better than just Intel Graphics is probably better though.</p>

<p>Another on the point and shoot side would by Olympus's Stylus Epic / mju2</p> <p>A Canonet might or might not be small enough.</p>

Many photography textbooks I've seen use cameras old enough nobody cares about trademark.

<p>RAM is a possibility but it would probably not give you trouble when transferring images. If you're having trouble transferring files that sounds like a connection or storage problem to me.</p> <p>Your computer's old enough it doesn't have USB 3.0 so maybe a cheap upgrade card could give you a faster connection to the camera or card reader.</p> <p>Someone else could probably tell you if a faster card reader is worth buying.</p> <p>A computer that old might start having trouble with the Hard Disk. Sometimes marginal hard disks get slow as the disk spends more time trying to read past hard errors. Also sometimes a filesystem that hasn't been checked in a while gets invalid and slows the whole system down, so running a checkdsk might be a good idea.</p> <p>Computer processors and RAM actually haven't sped up all that much in the last 4 generations since yours, but storage has. These days a pretty good SSD to replace the Hard Disk can be had in the $100-$200 range and that would speed up many things about your computer.</p>

<p>I think Vuescan may have it's own working driver for the LS-8000. Sometimes, if you're really lucky that driver can even resuscitate the manufacturer software.</p>

<p>There might be? I'm reading through some stuff on the TIFF format and it looks like the offsets used in the format are 32 bit integers. This gives the 4 gigabyte limit everyone should be familiar with by now. Looking later in the same article it looks like not only is that the case, but some implementations use signed 32bit integers (only 31 bits positive)in which case those particular programs can only support 2 gigabytes of image data. You're in that range so it could be possible, also if you scanned at 8 bits previously and 16 bits now it would put you under that limit before and over now. The problem is Adobe bought the company that controlled the TIFF format in the early 90s and stopped adding features. While our file systems ditched the 2/4GB limit, and so did our RAM, the Tagged Image File Format stayed unchanged.</p> <p>Another option though is that the file got corrupted on disk, and so there really is an unexpected end of file, because it's not supposed to be there.</p>

<p>Can be done on a flatbed. I Epson software go into the options and turn off auto-thumbnailing, in Vuescan you're looking for settings in the Crop tab. On a film scanner it's often not possible, with only one frame in place to scan at a time. If you crop to the same dimensions, and scan with the same exposure (easier to make happen with Vuescan than manufacturer software) it should be easy enough to fake it later by putting both on a black background.</p>

<p>I'm not familiar with X-Rite's software options but at a guess: maybe your gamma was done wrong? sRGB is about as close as most windows applications get to a spec for colors. Generally your display system is assumed to be at 2.2 gamma by programs that aren't color managed so if you calibrated with a different gamma as a target then that assumption is more false than usual. Photoshop can read your profile, and convert it's color numbers to ones that work for your display but other programs will make no conversion.</p>

<p>I'd go with at least a 4/3rd size sensor if it's in the budget. Tiny sensors do a very bad job indoors at high-ISOs. Yes they have high ISOs these days but I'm going to guess a real estate agent might want to get print-quality images instead of thumbnails when shooting indoors. A 28mm equivalent or less prime (for tight interiors) and a kit zoom might be all she'd need unless she plans to take pictures of houses from distant hills. So I don't think the 83x zoom is needed anyway and probably sacrifices quality and speed for flexibility she might only use once in a blue moon.</p>

<p>If you're trying to shoot a cropped f/1.4 50mm as a people lens in daylight and trying for paper-thin DoF then the lack of a 1/8000s shutter can be felt. Even then though, I'm not sure a polarizer would have cut the sun enough to hit maximum aperture.</p>

<p>Just to be clear: Fuji Crystal archive is a series of RA-4 color photographic papers usually used with Fuji Frontier minilab systems. It's not an inkjet paper at all and shouldn't be used as such.</p>

<p>You could also see if Vuescan can revive your scanner. It at least used to have a generic USB driver.</p>

<p>How blue is it? Is it a greyish blue? Or a really strange color of blue. If the former it may just be that this printer isn't very good a neutral black&white. If the latter maybe an ink is clogged.</p>

<p>Check the rollers. Sometimes paper dust and bleed ink gradually combine to form a felt-like layer on some parts of the machine. When a piece breaks off it can get tracked onto your print by a roller.</p>

<p>I think everything has been said for your particular problems. Vuescan is very powerful but halfway undocumented, at least nothing uses buzzwords so things are usually called roughly the right things. There is at least one good book out there on using Vuescan (I think it's The Vuescan Bible, but I forget). I never used a book but it did take a while to get the hang of things.</p>

<p>Vivitar 283s and 285s could go off-shoe but leave their sensor on the camera with a proprietary cord. From a technical standpoint there's nothing to prevent someone from creating a multi-strobe thyristor system this way, but there's not enough market to be worth making it. The T-90 is compatible with newer units because it had TTL-OTF flash metering, so the sensor is always on the camera, but it was the first and only FD camera to do so.</p>

<p>I don't think it's a guarantee that people will be away further from a larger print, it's just reflexively people will tend to take an overview of an image, fitting it into a relatively fixed angle of view. Also an image on a wall is awkward to examine in detail, and people don't like looking awkward.</p>