alanhill
08-09-2004, 7:04 PM
I may be a dinosaur - but I can't see a way of getting the quality I want from digital (without paying a silly amount).
But I was not happy with the quality I was getting from scanning my transparencies either, so I looked into upgrading my scanner. As I was using a Nikon Coolscan III, I naturally though about a Coolscan V; but I did some research and found a very useful website http://www.photozone.de/ which has a comparison of the Coolscan V with the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 - which they reckoned handles Kodachromes much better than the Nikon (and costs £300 less 8) ). Since I use Kodachrome 64 almost exclusively - it was a no-brainer :cheesy:
So I now have a 16 bit per channel scanner which can make 7500x5000 pixel scans of a 35mm frame (giving 200MB+ tif files). It does make a difference (although I am still learning how to use it).
The first picture below is a 640x480 image cropped from the centre of a scan made by my old CoolscanIII (I've posted it before in another thread). The second one is a matching scan of the same frame, made with my new scanner - it was a 16 pass scan (to reduce noise), cropped, reduced in size, unsharp masked, reduced to 8bit colour and saved as a jpeg.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/alanhill/Dwarf%20Puffers/DPfry2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/alanhill/Dwarf%20Puffers/DPfryTest1.jpg
I hope the difference is obvious.
Alan
But I was not happy with the quality I was getting from scanning my transparencies either, so I looked into upgrading my scanner. As I was using a Nikon Coolscan III, I naturally though about a Coolscan V; but I did some research and found a very useful website http://www.photozone.de/ which has a comparison of the Coolscan V with the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 - which they reckoned handles Kodachromes much better than the Nikon (and costs £300 less 8) ). Since I use Kodachrome 64 almost exclusively - it was a no-brainer :cheesy:
So I now have a 16 bit per channel scanner which can make 7500x5000 pixel scans of a 35mm frame (giving 200MB+ tif files). It does make a difference (although I am still learning how to use it).
The first picture below is a 640x480 image cropped from the centre of a scan made by my old CoolscanIII (I've posted it before in another thread). The second one is a matching scan of the same frame, made with my new scanner - it was a 16 pass scan (to reduce noise), cropped, reduced in size, unsharp masked, reduced to 8bit colour and saved as a jpeg.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/alanhill/Dwarf%20Puffers/DPfry2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v322/alanhill/Dwarf%20Puffers/DPfryTest1.jpg
I hope the difference is obvious.
Alan