Excellence color, sharpness, details for the price.
Interface / photoshop plug-in is slow on Mac OS8.6-9.2, MUCH faster on OSX and even Window 98.
4800 dpi reveals so much details on 35mm slide (a 80+mb files); 3200 dpi for 120 is also amazing.
For less than 10 % of the price of a drum / high-end scanner, you get almost 90% of the quality. Great for new films, for film over 10 years of age, it show all the dust, scratch and even mold... Perhap a lower end scanner may not reveal as much and save you hours of retouching; or else, take to professional scanning facility, professionally clean with solvent and scan by high-end scanner with oil applied may help (cost a lot more).
Strengths:
SCSI and Firewire input. Great for new film. No other similar product can match its performance in this price range.
Rating Reviewed by: David 42(Unregistered User)
(Professional)
Review Date December 23, 2003
Overall Rating 5 of 5
Value Rating 5 of 5
Used product for Less than 1 month
Visitors rate this review 5.00 of 5,
4 votes
Review 2 of 8
Price Paid:
$1700.00
from Germany
Summary:
Let me start with the conclusion: This scanner is fantastic! Some weeks ago a friend of mine borrowed me his Nikon Super Coolscan 8000 and I scanned around 60 medium-format negatives with it. The result was worse than mediocre. I had stripes on monochrome parts of the pictures, a brownish tone coming in from the edges, and, finally, the glassless holder was not capable of giving me overall sharp images. Furthermore, they were not even really sharp, even where the focus was set. It s not at all like that with the Minolta. First of all it is smaller and faster. The software does a good job in counting out the colour-masking of the negative. It works a bit like silverfast. One can scale the wanted size and scale of the photo, lot s of adjustments can be done before the scanning and it is easy to use. The well-build negative-holder (glassless) holds the 120-negative absolutely flat, so the scans are sharp from edge to edge. And apparently Minolta has build in a better lens. The scans are so sharp and detailed, that in fact I sometimes wish, they would be less perfect, so the grain would be more reduced. Which, of course is not Minolta s fault, and one can work on that later with photoshop. Also, I ve heard, there s a device on the market from a dutch company, called Scanhancer (for 30 euros), which reduces the grain effectively during the scan. For those, who don t trust the glassless holder, Minolta also but one with glass into the package (with Nikon, you have to buy that seperately for 250 euros). Which can be used for different formats, like 35mm panorama, if one makes a mask himself. And the Minolta is much cheaper. I got mine for 1.700 euros exclusive VAT.
While I'd read many positive reviews of this scanner, my actual experience was extremely disappointing. The manuals that came with the unit were entirely in Japanese (not sure how that occurred), the medium format film holder was defective (failed to eject properly from the first time it was inserted), and the directions that I DID manage to obtain from the Minolta website did a very poor job of explaining the actual sequence of operation of the unit. All that, combined with the fact that the plug-in used to interface with Photoshop 7 froze PS on numerous occasions, makes me wonder if I'm the only one with such problems. The images that the unit generated were decent, though a 6x6 negative scan with the DiMage software took a lot of manipulation to get to look even close to acceptable, and even then, the controls in the software seemed to be limited. Overall, very disappointing. I plan to return the unit and try something else.
An excellent piece of equipment that could be improved upon only by enhancing the workflow aspects of the software. Thank goodness I read the comparative reviews here first. I was going to get the Nikon 8000 almost by default (being a dyed in the wool Nikon user) but then read of the many problems that seem to plague that unit. Difficult to see how it gets 4.29 stars (at the time of writing), since around 80% of the comments I read were negative. (No pun intended!)
Strengths:
Extremely sharp, great dynamic range and a good range of well designed film holders. If you own an RZ67 or similar camera this is the scanner you need!!
Weaknesses:
The software could be improved but it does the job and so far hasn''t crashed on me, which is more than I can say for similar products
An excellent scanner for producing large prints of excellent quality.
Strengths:
Excellent sharpness and resolving power. Very low noise level, with multiscanning (4 times or more) none at all for practical purposes. The dynamic range is fantastic, even detail in dark areas of somewhat underexposed slide films, even difficult films like Velvia or Kodachrome (25 and 64), is picked up without unacceptable noise. The ROC and GEM functions in the software may do wonders with old or faded color negatives.
Weaknesses:
First version of software has a somewhat clumsy interface. This does not affect scans though, but requires discipline by operator, as previous settings are "remembered" for next scan. Perhaps somewhat to contrasty for easily scanning normally processed BW film.
Similar Products Used:
Minolta Scan Multi (1), Minolta Scan Dual (1), Minolta Scan Dual II, Nikon LS2000
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