David Mann wrote:
Hi all,
I've been playing with an HP S20 scanner which I may be buying from a friend who has just upgraded to the new Minolta 5400ppi scanner. Compared to my Agfa 1200ppi any-format-you-can-think-of scanner, the S20 pulls a LOT more detail off my slides as you could probably imagine, and it does so with less shadow noise and greater dynamic range.
One very good thing about the S20 is that it can scan 35mm panoramas at full resolution, without any stitching required. This allows me to scan slides taken with my modified RB67 back, which created 24x68mm images on 35mm film. Think Xpan or Mamiya 7II, but much cheaper... and SLR.
From my collection I've scanned half a dozen frames, four of which I hadprinted at the lab today (two photos per 18x12" print). They turned out very well. Now I'm going to frame them. I was using Dreamweaver (an HTML editor) to work out appropriate matting colours and figured I might as well let PDML take a look.
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/temp/pans/
The page is just over 300kb in size so it might take a few moments to load. It really needs 1024x768 minimum as I made the images 800 pixels wide.
Let me know what you think. Please excuse the lame titles :) BTW I'll probably change my mind about the colours, and they're likely to look different on your screens anyway.
Oh yes, the ones I had printed were the four at the top. The other two images are just scaled versions of the raw scans so don't hassle me if you find dust or rough edges (literally - long story).
Obligatory Pentax content: I replaced the RB kit with a Pentax 6x7 kit. No more panoramas until I decide that its worth making an adaptor for the Pentax (yeah I know I can crop a full 6x7 frame... I wish the S20 could do medium format).
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com
