>At 17:25 +0100 13/8/01, Tony Sleep wrote:
>The usual complaint was that the scanner set autoexposure from the first
>slide in the hopper, and then imposed the same settings on all subsequent
>slides.
You can turn auto exposure on/off in Vuescan & I think that the 'auto
with ADF' check box in Silverfast does the same thing. Vuescan has
added features. You can set a border - so that auto scans include a
bit more than the crop shown - to allow for varying mount aperture
sizes. Also allows you to set a 'buffer' which ignores a strip around
the edge so that auto exposures do not include any mount with smaller
aperture mounts.
With the above set properly auto exposure works very well. Even in
Silverfast it works well enough & it plays music to let you know when
it's finished. Sticky or damaged mounts will easily jam the feeder,
it's very easy to run out of disk space - particularly if you are
getting 48 bit output. It really is only for use when unattended, it
will work in the background but it really slows my old G3 to
unusability.
Silverfast make you pay extra for the serial number to work the SF200!
The main defect of the Nikon SF200 is its mechanical handling design.
It is just not good enough to deal with the real world range of worn,
bent, taped, sticky transparency mounts. This needs a bit of proper
engineering. As for what I'd rather have - how about an adaptor that
took carousel trays? Gravity feed is very reliable, trays are easily
available & hold nearly double the number of slides. More? Fast
prescan that lets me set rotation, exposure, crop for each pic then
scans the whole batch while I sleep. Oh - & embeds the IPTC data in
the tiffs.
David Hoffman
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