[filmscanners] Bad Multi Pro Unit?

["Joe Tait" <jtait@texas.net>]

I am pretty new to film scanning and at our work we recently got a
Minolta DiMAGE Multi Pro. I
am questioning whether I have a bad unit or if I don't know what the
hell I am
doing. I haven't had enough time to explore all the various settings,
but here
is what I've done so far...

I have been scanning both color slides (velvia & provia) and B&W (HP5+
& PanF+,
TMAX400 35mm), 95% MF and all at native resolution, 16bit (both linear and
non-linear), 8pass & 4pass. I am using OSX, firewire, and using both
the Minolta
and Vuescan. My monitor is calibrated meticulously under MonacoPROOF.

I seem to be getting a red cast quite often irrespective of the
film-combo/software. Known neutrals in the originals have far too much
red in
them. When I did a 16bit RAW scan in Vuescan of a Kodachrome 35mm IT8
target,
the red cast was horrible. Is this a defect? I have done adjustment
curves on
some of the scans and those scans definitely turn out better
color-wise, but I
don't know if those adjustments are undermining my ability to judge if
I have a
bad unit.

BTW, I am looking at these in PS7 and so far have chosen to "not color
manage"
when opening the files, and there was no tag on the files when Vuescan or
Minolta writes the files.

Although I don't have anything to compare it too, there seems to be a fair
amount of noise in _ALL_ channels, blue has the same as all others,
green is
definitely not sharper than other channels in any of the scans I've
made. I have
tried both auto & manual focus. A MF velvia slide that I have is
georgeous under
the loupe, but pretty grainy at "actual pixels" in PS. B&W has been
_really_
grainy and a MF PanF+ neg @ ISO64 is about as grainless as it gets! (I
scanned
B&W as color slide and B&W with similiar results).

What do ya'll think? I really need to know so that we can send back
the unit or
it''s my ass!

Thanks.

-Joe

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