RE: filmscanners: Any Minolta Scan Multi Pro Reports Out There???

["Wilson, Paul" <PWilson@gomez.com>]

I have one and so far I really like it.  One of the nicest things about it
is that it works.  

I had the Nikon.  In fact, I was one of the first people in the country to
receive the thing.  It's too bad but Nikon shipped the thing totally
prematurely IMO.  I had just about every problem that's been reported on it.
The upside of the Nikon was that, when it worked, it worked very well.
Camera World was nice enough to take it back.

I also had the Polaroid and that one was stable and the scan quality was
very good (the Nikon seemed just slightly sharper).  However, I decided I
really wanted Digital ICE and I got a bit paranoid about Polaroid's health.
I probably shouldn't have been too worried about that but I really do like
ICE.  So, Camera World was also nice enough to take that one back.

I've waited about 5 months but Camera World won't be getting this one back.
Scan quality is excellent.  Sharpness is as good as the Nikon and it seems
to see into shadows as well either of the other two.  It's been reported
that speed can be a problem and it is slow scanning at 4800 dpi, 16x
multisample and with ICE on.  However, it's much faster with normal settings
and it also runs faster as a Photoshop plugin vs. standalone.  For some
reason, when operating as a stand alone program, it spends a lot of time
saving the image after the scan is done.  Running in Photoshop this is not a
problem.  I haven't done it yet but I suspect it will be slower at 4800 dpi
vs. 3200 dpi for MF scans due to the interpolation.  I've only scanned at
3200 dpi for medium format which is plenty anyway.  It doesn't scan B&W well
with the B&W setting but scanning B&W as a color slide and then inverting in
Photoshop seems to work well.

Other nice features are that it's small, quiet and the film holders work
well.  Of the bunch in fact, I think the MF film holder for the Minolta is
the best for holding film flat.  The downside of it is you can only do one
MF scan before having to reposition the film.  The 35mm holders on all
seemed equally good but those are pretty easy to engineer anyway.  

The Minolta also doesn't totally lock my machine up while scanning so I can
still use it for other things.  To be fair, my machine (a dual PIII 866 with
SCSI HD's) has 1G of RAM now whereas it only had 512MB with the other two
but the Nikon would lock the machine up scanning a 35mm slide, not just
medium format.  I'm using the Minolta's SCSI interface and it's hooked to an
Adaptec 29160N.

Keep in mind that I've only had the thing for a few days now and I'm no
expert on film scanning.  However, I do know a thing or two about
photography and I know a thing or 3 about computers.  The fact that a
scanner worked more or less perfectly right off the bat is amazing.

www.imaging-resource.com and www.luminous-landscape.com both have
discussions about this scanner and all reviews are positive overall.

Paul Wilson

> -----Original Message-----
> From: david/lisa soderman [mailto:scapes@wi.net]
> Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2001 10:30 AM
> To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
> Subject: filmscanners: Any Minolta Scan Multi Pro Reports Out There???
> 
> 
> Howdy.
> It's been a while since the Minolta Scan Multi Pro units have 
> been shipping.
> Just wondering if anyone has real life experience with this unit.  Any
> sincere pros & cons would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> Joyfully,  -david soderman- <><
>