Entered CNET Catalog: 08/14/2003
SKU: 0043325994029
Manufacturer: Konica Minolta
Manufacturer description
The popularity of digital imaging is continually on the rise. It is involved in numerous professional applications as well as home use for e-mail correspondence, Internet web sites, and cataloging on CD. Minolta's DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 makes it easy for 35mm film camera enthusiasts to create professional-quality digital images from their film slides and negatives. With 5, 400 dpi resolution, advanced lens optics, simple scanning and image-processing procedures, plus USB or FireWire interfaces, creating beautiful digital scans is "quick as a click."Product summary
The good: High resolution; solid scan quality.
The bad: Hard-to-use software interface needs work; slow scan-adjustment tools; lacks version of Digital ICE.
The bottom line: This is a great entry-level film scanner for advanced amateurs, but it's not quite ready for pros.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 10/28/2004
Hardly bigger than an external hard drive, the Scan Elite 5400 takes up just 6.5 by 2.6 inches of space and weighs about five pounds. To help move all that data, there's a FireWire and a USB 2.0 port on the back of the scanner. You'll find three buttons on the front of the 5400--Power, Eject, and Scan--and a dial for controlling manual focus. Also in the box are 35mm-film and slide holders, which allow you to scan several frames in one go. Konica Minolta rates the Scan Elite 5400's optical density at 4.8D--exceptional for a scanner at this price. (Nikon rates the similarly priced Coolscan V at just 4.2D.) From within the Dimage Scan utility, you can tweak exposure, hue, saturation, and color. Unfortunately, the software is really disappointing. We experienced significant delays when applying changes. Also, Dimage Scan has one of the worst interfaces we've seen. It's bogged down by too many menus and poorly worded options. Konica Minolta could stand to give it an overhaul.
While the Dimage 5400 produces very good scans, with excellent dynamic range and shadow detail, it isn't capable of the sharpness we saw from the Nikon Coolscan V, which features Kodak's Digital ICE4, the latest version of the technology. (Kodak offers Digital ROC and Digital GEM for Photoshop via its Web site, but you can't get results as good by postprocessing.) The Dimage 5400 features the original version of Digital ICE for dust and scratch removal, but unlike Nikon's Digital GEM implementation, its Grain Dissolver is less effective at removing noise from high-ISO films. It tends to blur images rather than remove grain. The 5400's autofocus isn't extremely precise on the initial scan, but it gets points for the manual control dial. The company even added a feedback slider to help you make finer adjustments.
You'll get a cleaner scan by using the multisampling option, which scans the image numerous times, then averages out some of the dirt and noise, though it'll add more time to your scan. While you can go all the way up to 16X, we found the best balance of improvement vs. time at 2X to 4X. Scan time for a 28MB file came in at around 60 seconds, with a slight increase when using ICE. If you make a lot of exposure and color corrections to the image, you may wait up to 4 minutes for a scan of a similar size. If you scan a file at maximum resolution with Digital ICE turned on, you'll wait about 3 minutes, which is longer than the Coolscan V's time of 1 minute, 10 seconds.
Online technical support is well organized, with easy-to-find links to downloadable manuals and drivers. Konica Minolta offers a product-specific Q&A to help you identify and potentially solve your technical issue. There's also a list of repair shops posted online. If you want to talk to someone from Konica Minolta, however, you're out of luck. There's no e-mail or phone support.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3out of 3 user reviews
Amazing results; breathtaking color
Pros: Exceptional detail in, and clarity of, images
Cons: You'll also need photo editing software (e.g. Photoshop).
I scan at full resolution, maximum color depth (16 bit) and with the multiscan on 'full' all of the time (and them burn the scans onto CD): this produces image files of 233.5 megabytes. I use the manual focus option for best results (for images I'll print). I scan from the Minolta scan software into a directory on my computer's hard drive; then, when I'm done scanning, I edit the images in Photoshop CS. I don't open Photoshop before scanning, because that ties up RAM in the computer that the scanner needs in order to work as quickly as possible - even if you close Photoshop before scanning (you should reboot before scanning if you've had Photoshop open). I don't scan from inside Photoshop because I often scan 4 images at a time (when archiving entire rolls of film: I just set the scanner up, leave it running, and do other things while it scans). Since each frame scanned at the maximum settings is 233 megabytes, scanning a strip of film can overload a computers RAM and crash the operating system (wiping out the RAM-resident scans) IF you are inside Photoshop, which 'accumulates' the scans in RAM until they are all done. Scan from the Minolta scan software, into a directory: each scan will be saved to the hard drive as it is finished, before the next one is started.
I haven't heard anyone ever mention that having all the settings of this scanner turned to full (with Digital Ice engaged) results in scan times of ~1.5 hours per color image... or ~2.5 hours if Photoshop is holding RAM space the scanner needs (on my machine, anyway: an Athlon XP +2700 based system with 2 gigabytes of DDR RAM). Everyone talks about 1 minute scan times, which it will certainly produce at lower settings. I have photos I love, that in some cases took me days of wilderness hiking and hours of setting up and waiting for just the right lighting... and I really don't mind waiting ~1.5 hours to have a digitized version of any of those photographs that I can put on a CD and never have to think about re-scanning. I am of the opinion that this is indeed a professional quality scanner: because, when you want professional quality results, it is the end product that matters - not how much effort goes into obtaining quality results.
I started developing and printing black and white film in 1974, at the age of 14: I have A LOT of film to digitize and I couldn't be happier with the results this scanner produces. I do edit all of my scans in Photoshop: for instance, I convert the color profile of each scan to LAB color and sharpen the "L" channel (luminance; black-to-white image elements) to undo the minor "fuzziness" associated with any digitizing of images (I use Power Retouche's "Gentle Unsharp Mask" plug-in filter for that).
Again, this scanner is exceptional: if you shoot film or have a film archive, this scanner provides an excellent base for a digital darkroom. It's software won't replace professional level image editing software BUT, professional software is never going to be capable of anything over and beyond the quality of image that you bring into it; and this scanner produces image quality that makes using professional image editing software worth what that software costs.
John M.
www.OriginOfWriting.com
out of 3 user reviews
good scans when the buggy software works
Pros: Really good resolution for the price
Cons: There appears to be a memory leak, on the PC version (1.1.5) operating under XP or Windows 2000, which can result in software/computer crashes. Handle count, as viewed in the Windows Task manager continues to increase with each scan. After just a few scan
out of 3 user reviews
The ONLY way to make mega-sized files!
Pros: Easy, straightforward installation.
Cons: Making those really big files is a long, drawn out, arduous process ... even with 2.8 GHz and 512 MB RAM? ... and did I mention it was SLOW? But hey! If you stick to scanning only what you really have to, then it's a great accessory. If KM would speed u
