Canon FS 4000 & Minolta Scan Elite II Questions

[Richard Martin <marphoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi List:

   I am in the market for a film scanner (my first) and have
narrowed my choices down to two - the Canon FS 4000 and the
Minolta Scan Elite II, both of which are in my price range. I am
running a Pentium 4 with 512MB ram, 40GB HD, and Win XP Home
Edition. I would use the scanner mostly for slides, not
negatives.
   While the Minolta appears to have user-friendly software and
apparently can be used as a stand-alone product as well as
through Photoshop, I am concerned about a banding or streaking
problem that some reviewers have reported, especially in the
shadows. I do a fair amount of low-light photography and while I
realize that this type of image is probably difficult for any
scanner, the banding or streaking issue has me worried. Any
thoughts?
   I am leaning toward the Canon, partly because of the higher
imput res, partly because it appears to be a very sharp scanner,
but most especially because I saw no reports of banding or
streaking with this unit. I don't see that you can use this as a
stand-alone scanner but I think I have enough memory to scan
through Photoshop (I have version 7), at least for the size
files I'll mostly be working with. The printer I am currently
using is the Epson C80, their heavy-weight matte paper, with the
image size somewhere between 5 x 7 and 8 x 10. And making prints
is mostly what I want to do (but archiving too, via a CD
burner).
   Canon's website doesn't mention XP but I assume this scanner
is compatible with XP. Am I wrong?
   Bottom line: would the Canon be a better choice for me, given
what I want to do? Any downside to this choice?
   I'm still pretty new to this digital stuff (though not to
photography itself) so please forgive me if the above sounds
naive or uninformed. I really could use some help on this. Feel
free to email me privately if you wish.

                                                   Richard

=====
Richard Martin specializes in Cityscape and Waterscape stock photography as well as Children's Portraiture. E-mail: marphoto@yahoo.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience
http://launch.yahoo.com
-
Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate
subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.