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Hi Richard, Your questions are neither naive or uninformed, and in fact you seem to have a good grasp on the problems. I have not worked with either scanner directly, but I do own the Dual II Minolta which is almost the identical scanner to the Elite II, with the major differences being that the Elite II uses a 16 bit A/D depth, has dICE and other ASF licenses and software, and is in a slightly different box. I believe the Minolta Elite II is one of the most overpriced products on the market. They price it at literally twice the price of the Dual II, and for that you get slightly better shadow detail and the dICE software, which is actually pretty needed, and should have been included with the Dual as well, since it tends to pick up every dust, dirt and scratch (and grain) on the film. I will further this by saying Minolta, as a company seems to be in complete denial of the production problems they have been having, which cause intermittent bad calibration, shadow noise, and "lazy sensors" that I am beginning to believe are just due to dirty production procedures causing dirt on some optical components, or the CCD itself. I have yet to have them acknowledge this problem, and their solution seems to be to accept the units back and exchange them. I know of dozens of cases personally of these units being defective (both the Elite II and Dual II). The Canon FS-4000 comes with its own IR cleaning process which is not quite as effective according to some reports. However, in terms of software, Ed Hamrick's Vuescan now supports it considerable better than previously, and this might work as a good alternative to Filmget, and even that program has been improved in the new version. The main complaint I have heard about the Canon is that it doesn't give as clean shadows due to limited dynamic range, as more expensive scanners like the Nikon 4000 or the Polaroid or Artixscan (Microtek) 4000. If you wish, I can probably connect you with someone I know who owns the Canon. Please email me in private. Art Richard Martin wrote: > 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 > > - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.
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