[filmscanners] Re: Which is better - Canon,Nikon,Minolta - Please advise...

["" <HMSDOC@aol.com>]

<< IF there are others here who have the Canon and can honestly dispute my
 findings, I'd love to hear from you because the price is soooo right on
 the Canon! >>

Hi Doug.......My comments will be honest because I own an FS4000 and just
recently bought a Polaroid SS4000+.  Let me qualify my comments: 1) I am
somewhat of a novice and 2) I obviously would not have bought the SS4000+ if
I were totally satisfied with the Canon.  That said, while agree with some of
your commenst I also disagree with some of them.

<<<Here's the scoop on the FS4000.  The FARE dust and scratch removal works
pretty well with *minor* particles, but fails miserably with dirty
slides.  IT blows out the highlights and shadows on negs to pure white
and black respectively and requires lots of post work to clean it up.>>>

I have found FARE to work very well.  Once again, I must qualify.  The slides
I have used are all new, but have had the typical, non-pro-shop dust etc as
well as dust and minor scratches from storage.  In these instances I have
found FARE to work extremely well.  As a matter of fact, most reviews that I
have read on the internet discuss how nice FARE is and how it doesn't degrade
the image.  I have not seen the problem you mention of FARE blowing out the
highlights etc.  My only really old and horribly dirty and fungus laden
slides are a box of old Kodachromes that are truly ancient.  FARE did a lousy
job on these, but I believe that the Canon literature says that FARE is not
effective with Kodachromes.  So I think the botom line is that it depends on
what you define *mild* particles as in terms of my bying able to speak
towards this.  In my experience FARE has worked exceedingly well.



<<<The film strip guide protrudes so far out of the scanner on frame 1 that
it sags to the point of almost falling out of the scanner.  So badly,
that the gears grind trying to pull it back into the unit. >>>

I have to disagree here as well. In my experience there is a bit of up and
down motion, but the scanner seems to know what it is doing.  I have never
had the frame shifted downward on frame 1 compared to the other frames nor
have I had frame 1 be out of focus.  I also have not had my unit gring the
gears trying to pull the carrier back in on frmae 1.  From a mechanical
standpoint my unit has been flawless.



<<<The FilmGet
software, only a Photoshop plug-in and not stand alone, cannot batch
scan.  Well, it can, but only to memory, not to a file.  How much ram is
required to batch 6 frames on a strip at 4000dpi?  Say no more...
Imagine trying to batch an 40 frame APS roll!  Since I've got quite a
bit of >>>

I agree with you that this is not the scanner for a large volume operator.



<<<Then the kicker as you mentioned, is speed!  A boy is it a dog.  Over 10
minutes per frame for a 4000dpi grab!  AHHHH.>>>>


TOTALLY AGREE...this is one slow scanner.  I have 2 image editing programs PS
and Picture Window Pro.  Oddly enough, in PWP the scanner is slow, in PS, for
some reason, at least on my system it is truly painfully slow (though I am on
USB and not SCSI, perhaps SCSI would improve the situation).  Even if you
could batch scan to file the speed would make this painful for a high volume
scanner in PS (at least with USB...my system has 512 of RAM).


So why did I get the SS4000?  1)Noise in shadow areas with the FS4000
2)Improved shadow detail 3)Speed (Firewire)

In short, I think the Canon is  great if you are not high volume and are not
totally obsessive about shadow noise (ie I think you will be unhappy if you
blow up your scans to 100% on the monitor to examine them, but would be happy
if what you want is 8x10 prints of very good quality).  But based on what you
say, the Canon would be eliminated based on speed alone given your volume.

Howard

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