Malcolm, I would be hesitant to recommend the Scan Dual II for someone who is going to predominantly scan slides. The Dynamic Range on this scanner is about 3.0 and I find that many of my slides don't scan quite as well as I would like. I would really look at the Nikon's which also have a stack loader available and perhaps ICE so that you don't have to spend so much time cleaning up thousands of images. You would be suprised at how much dust hangs onto the slides.
Much of this depends on how much you are willing to spend. The Minolta is a good scanner in it's price range. But it is at the lower end of film scanners in capabilities. Bruce Friday, January 18, 2002, 6:25:48 AM, you wrote: MS> I have the Scan Dual II myself and happen to use PaintShop Pro V7. One MS> thing you should strongly consider is using Hamrick's Vuescan software MS> (www.hamrick.com) to scan with. It does a much better job than the MS> Minolta software. It also supports batch scanning better - less MS> attending by the operator. It can also autonumber in some fashion for MS> file naming. MS> I used to scan at lower resolutions, but in the past while, I just MS> scan at max and save as jpg 5% compression. If you use PaintShop's MS> proprietary format, you are limiting yourself to just the Paintshop MS> tool. For instance, I use Ulead's Photo Explorer to quickly look at MS> images on cd. It doesn't recognize proprietary stuff. Many other MS> tools you might use won't either. Then you would be stuck with MS> converting back and forth. MS> HTH. MS> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- MS> -------------------------------------- MS> I have seen very good reviews of the Scan Dual II, and as I have many MS> thousands of slides which I would like to put onto CD, I'm tempted. How long MS> does it take to scan 4 slides (the one damn thing I should have checked)? MS> The flatbed scanner I have been given is very slow, I just want to have some MS> idea whether it is a few minutes or go and do something else while it scans MS> it! Apologies if this has already been stated ;-) MS> Malcolm MS> - MS> This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, MS> go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to MS> visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org . - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
