I got myself Konica Minolta's Dimage Scan Dual IV film scanner (got mine from Amazon for $236.99). Excellent value and really decent reviews were reasons I decided to pick this model. It lacks ICE but my pockets are not deep enough at the moment to think of anything more expensive. So couple of days ago I got around and started makeing scans and what I found out was that DS Dual4 Utility software keeps crashing every now and then. Off-topic but Minolta has really come out with... substandard software anyway. And the bad thing is that you cannot just restart software as it tells you that there's something still running and you have to close it. I took a look at ongoing processes but couldn't figure out what it was. So I needed to make a restart after each crash. Do I have to tell you how stupid that felt?
Today I continued making batch-scans and again I get those crashes on my 12-inch 1.2GHz Apple iBook (read what I think of iBook as a photoediting tool). I think I finally figured it out. Looks like crashes only occurr after display goes to sleep. Scanner finishes current patch, ejects film holder and software crashes. When you turn off display sleeping then everything works fine. At least I haven't had any more crashes. Will update this post if I discover something further about it.
How's Dimage Scan Dual IV? Looks great actually. I've only scanned my first 5-6 films and doing it on maximum quality and having Dust Brush on takes quite a long time but results looks impressive. Haven't worked out some brightness-contrast issues yet (on my current settings it looks as if scanner want's to get detail from dark areas that is not really there and ends up creating bit more noisy files than necessary) but getting really good details from my shots. Did I already say that Minolta software sucks?
2 comments:
I've heard that most people use VueScan software for scanning to get best results. It is not for free though, but not expensive either.
It's still $50 for standard edition. Trying to find out what you get with professional edition if you pay $40 more. Oh, ok - with professional edition you get possibility to create raw scan files, ability to use ICC profiles and color spaces (might actually be useful) and IT8 color calibration (never heard of it).
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