Re: filmscanners: Minolta Dual II banding

[Arthur Entlich <artistic@ampsc.com>]

Someone sent me some Minolta Dimage II samples scans recently which he 
indicated were banded.

I did a bit of dissecting, and discovered that although they weren't 
very noticeable when looking at the full color scan,  the same could not 
be said when the scan was looked at in channels in photoshop, where 
there were obvious either defects in the CCD or filters, or dust within 
the product on the CCD image area.  Both the red and blue channels 
showed streaks in different locations.  The green channel was pretty clean.

It would appear Minolta has some QC problems to work out.  I suggest 
anyone buying one of these scanner immediately scan an image and look at 
it in channels (individually) in Photoshop for banding or streaks in the 
image.

Art

Konstantin Levay wrote:

> My first Minolta Dual II produced scans with severe banding that was
> probably due to faulty CCD - thick band of yellowish color located always at
> the same position within the frame. That scanner was returned for
> replacement. The second Dual II works flawlessly so far. Scans are very
> sharp with much better overall quality and shadow details than from two HP
> s20 I have used before.
> I agree that Minolta software is not good in auto mode or prescans (and
> their tech support is just sucks!), however with manual tweaking it does
> produce decent scans, although slow with negs. VueScan is a great help here.
> 
> K. Levay