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Home >> Photography >> Digital Minolta DiMage Scan Dual III
My spendthrift ways evolved into a miserly, penny-pinching attitude to ensure I get maximum bang for my buck for whatever I buy or invest in. No gas guzzling SUV for Edwin to look cool in, instead a decidedly suburban minivan, which guzzles an equal amount of gas but is just so damn practical. No spiffy house in the trendy west side of Vancouver’s Kitsilano or Point Grey neighborhoods, instead a boxy Vancouver-special in the burb of Burnaby (readers from the local area will know exactly what I mean by Vancouver-special). I still manage to satiate my desires here and there as was the case last summer when I successfully managed to worm my way into buying the Nikon D100 D-SLR; however, I smoothed the purchase over by buying my wife a pricey Omega watch for our fifth wedding anniversary. My brothers-in-law who are married to my wife’s sisters are less than impressed with the precedent I had started, sorry guys. Now despite my foray into digital imaging with the D100, I still had a few slides and negs here and there that I wouldn’t mind having scanned. I wasn’t looking for some huge file size from a 4000 ppi scan for big enlargement potential, just something to be able to produce a nice 8x12 to 11x14 inch print. Ideally, I would like to have purchased the Minolta Pro Scan Multi, a $4000 CAN film scanner that scans medium format and 35mm film. Unfortunately, in the summer of 2002, when I did have $4000 to spend, I decided that a D-SLR would fit in better for my long-term requirements. I was not wrong with the decision and I very much like my D100; however, the pangs of desire for scanning film did not go away. I thought I had my mind made up, or close to, in looking at either a Nikon Coolscan IV or Canon FS4000 35mm film scanners that are priced the same at $1100 CAN. Of the two, the Canon FS4000 gave the better bang for the buck with 4000-ppi resolution and Canon’s FARE feature that mimics the anti-dust benefits of Digital ICE found in the Coolscan IV. I was just waiting for the time when I would be able to have enough discretionary money to do so. Then I heard about the new Minolta scanner that was priced at less than half of what the Nikon or Canon scanners were selling for with some interesting specifications. The Minolta Scan Dual III is obviously the successor to the Scan Dual II, which sold for the same price when it was current, $500 CAN. I never heard or read much about Minolta’s entry-level scanner and while priced right, did not seem to offer enough to warrant interest. However, there was something about the new Scan Dual III that got me intrigued. A $500 scanner with an anti-dust feature, albeit software based only and not hardware as is the case with Digital ICE, and with multi-sampling capabilities to allow for a much higher DMAX spec than the Nikon or Canon scanners. The resolution is only 2840 ppi and this is quite a ways from Canon’s 4000 ppi, but meaningless compared to the 2900 ppi resolution of the Coolscan IV. Add to that two favorable reviews from much respected digital reviewers at Steve’s Digicams and Imaging-Resource, and it was enough to put me over the edge and order one up from Broadway Camera. Oh yes, that $500 price tag played to my miserly heart. The Scan Dual III is quite compact and weighs very little. It is relatively deep owing to the length of its film holders. The slide holder holds four slides and the Scan Dual III can handle APS format film too, but this comes as an optional accessory, which I like, because why pay extra for a bundled accessory that you may never use, as is the case with the Canoscan FS4000. Both film holders are simple and effective, but I think the negative film holder could have held the film a bit tighter. Slides just slide into their individual slots with no fuss and no muss. Once the film has been placed in the holder, you just insert the holder into the scanner until the motor grabs it with a low whining sound, after that you leave it alone and go into the Scan Dual’s software.
When I first bought the Scan Dual III (SD-III) I did some quick cursory scans with some test slides and was quite happy with the quality received straight out of the box at default settings. It also revealed just how nefarious dust and other gunk can be when magnifying a small piece of film by such a large factor. Straight off, various reviewers have indicated that the anti-dust software for the SD-III is not as good as Digital Ice and I have no reason not to believe them. Even at the strongest setting, the largest and strongest bits of dust were still readily seen, especially in the lighter toned areas of a slide or negative. You will need to get familiar with Photoshop’s Healing Brush or the Cloning Stamp to clean up the scan before doing serious editing of the image files. There’s no free lunch and a scanner at the price level of the SD-III just is not going to have the superior technology of ICE available. This is the price you pay for going the budget scanning route and I do not recommend the SD-III for those who are still shooting large amounts of film or have very large film libraries to digitize. The work flow and efficiency of a Digital ICE capable scanner will repay itself in major productivity dividends by not fighting with dust all the time. I can live with the limitations of the SD-III because I neither have a large film library and neither do I shoot a large amount of film anymore. Image Quality Slide
Film Velvia can be quite dense to scan and obtain any detail in the shadows depending on how you rate it and what kind of conditions you use it in. Kodachrome has quite muted colors by comparison and I certainly wouldn’t consider it to be highly accurate either with colors that can sometimes be quite off and require correction in Photoshop. Negative
films I could not believe how much grain came through from even lower speed professional films such as Fuji NPS 160 or Fuji Reala 100. The scan results would have had me think that I was instead scanning an ISO 800 or higher speed film instead of ISO 100 or 160. Comparing the negative scans to those made from Fuji Provia 100F was night and day and was completely the opposite of my assumptions of what kind of quality I would receive from scanning film. Does this make the scanner less than useful for scanning negatives? No, not at all so long as you use some noise reduction software, such as from Neat Image Pro. A friend of mine has this application and worked some sample scans I sent him and made the samples as good if not better than scanning slide film. B&W
films Software
Enhancements from the Scan Dual III You can adjust the Pixel Polish settings to open up the shadows and adjust the color cast. Now of course you could do this with the TWAIN software’s editing parameters too, but I’ve never been big on using a scanner’s editing adjustments, preferring to get as clean a scan as possible and then doing the serious editing in Photoshop. I would only use the scanner software’s tone and curves control for problem slides or negatives. Pixel Polish just allows you to experiment a bit without getting too fussy with the levels and curves. Just as I tend to ignore the scanner’s levels and curves, I also ignore the Unsharp Masking feature because as most digital darkroom enthusiasts know, USM is best applied after all the major edits are complete and you’re ready to output the image. USM is not an arbitrary setting to be applied at a whim, but must be applied appropriately for the given output use of the image. Usage as an Internet image is not the same as outputting to a printer and as such, each type of use has a particular sharpening requirement. Even printing at different sizes and viewing distances require a particular sharpening amount, so again, it is best to leave sharpening to the end of the edit. The speed of the scanner is not too bad. As of now, I am only running it on the old USB 1 standard, but the SD-III is USB 2 compatible, so faster scanning times are in the offering. Some sample scans I timed are as follows on a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 1 GB of RAM on USB 1 and without any image enhancements such as anti-dust or Pixel Polish:
The SD-III has a maximum sampling rate of 8x and can output a 16 bit depth scan. When using Photoshop to access the TWAIN software, it took 5 seconds for the software to open up and be ready for scanning again. From what I’ve heard of other scanners, these times are not bad at all and once I upgrade to USB 2, I would expect even better times. I would not bother with the Photoshop TWAIN plug-in for a multiple scanning session given the wasted amount of time it takes for the TWAIN driver to initialize each time you finish a scan to start another one. Best just to use the standalone scanning software. You can also save yourself a good chunk of time from not bothering with the 8x sampling rate because I could see no difference between 8x versus 4x sampling and truthfully I had trouble seeing any difference between 1x versus 4x sampling too. I used a slide that had a good amount of detail in the shadow portions of the image for the sampling rate test. The anti-dust brush can be safely used on its strongest setting all of the time as there is only a slight softening of the image with the highest setting. Compared to the extra amount of time you would spend cleaning up a scan with the Dust Brush off, I can live with the miniscule amount of softening; however you do need to be aware of the limitations of the dust brush and what it might to do to certain sections of the your image. See the sample images page for an example. Comparisons Conclusion I think the Minolta fits in a nice niche for those who have limited budgets or limited number of 35mm film who do not want to lose much quality. Would the SD-III match even more expensive scanners for scan quality? I don’t know, but my guess would be not quite. For those who have a large film library, I think the SD-III is not the scanner for them given its less than state of the art scanning ability and lack of Digital ICE, which would make for more productive scanning. For me though, the cheapskate in me is liking it a lot for its ability to let me save some money towards other needed items in the my digital darkroom kit while letting me get my 35mm film into the digital realm. Page 2 - Sample Scans and Comparisons - Warning, this page has multiple sample images saved as maximum quality JPEGs to reduce artefacts. Update October 6, 2003 - There have been recent rumblings on the Photo.net forum for the Digital Darkroom about buggy Minolta scanning software and PCs running Win XP and why reviewers had not mentioned these seemingly obvious problems in their reviews of the SD-III. Simple, the reviewers did not experience any in the manner in which they used the scanner during the review. Certainly, I experienced no problems with the SD-III when the I wrote the comments above on my Win XP based P4; however, I have experienced some problems under certain conditions after posting the review. When using the SD-III plugged into a USB 2 port and scanning in 16 bit mode, the Minolta scanning software froze and I had to close the application and then turn the scanner off before attempting to resume again. Most times, the software and scanner kept on freezing. The problem lies with the USB 2 port I was using, which was via a PCI USB 2 adapter card plugged into the motherboard of my computer. As with Epson printers, Minolta scanners do not like to be plugged into USB hubs or adapter cards, BUT this problem only surfaced when I used the scanner in 16 bit mode whereas 8-bit mode worked fine through the USB 2 port. Since I am not using the scanner very often, I shrugged it off and plugged it back into a USB 1 port, which is direct from the motherboard. Now all modes work whether 8-bit or 16 bit. Besides which, I did not see much if any improvement in scanning times through the USB 2 connection when the scanner did work. The USB 2 card is not wasted either, even if I did buy it specifically to use with the scanner, as I have a number of other USB devices that work fine with it (all USB 1 not USB 2). Others posted comments about the Minolta software and Photoshop not working well together to which I can only ask, why are you even bothering to run the Minolta TWAIN from Photoshop? It is not about how buggy the software is but about workflow. Everytime you scan through Photoshop, the Minolta software will open up the file in Photoshop, which is fine for one off scans, but if you're batch scanning a number of slides, scanning through Photoshop is a colossal waste of time. Better to run the Minolta software on its own and scan everything at once before going into Photoshop or other editor to work on the files. But that's just me and my opinion. Comments from a reader:
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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I
am a cheapskate! A very peculiar statement to make for one who has
invested as much money as I have into photography and digital imaging
resources, especially since my medium format kit alone approaches
a multi $10k amount. Alas, I did most of my spending in headier times
before the onslaught of family, mortgage obligations and an accountant
wife threw cold water on my photographic aspirations.
The
TWAIN software can either be standalone or started up in Photoshop,
either way, the software is the same. There are two versions, one
is wizard based for the beginning user and one is more traditional
in having various menus and buttons to access all the features and
controls of the Minolta software. I’m not going to go into all the
details of the software because Imaging-Resource has already done
so in great detail and in a far better manner than what I would have
done anyway. I will state that the standard interface is not hard
to work around and after a few scanning sessions; everything fell
into place for accessing the various features.