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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 4 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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6 out of 6 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Great scanner right out of the box!"
Pros: True colors, Digital GEM to remove grain works great. Pretty quick scans even with ICE and GEM. Compact construction and easy installation.
Cons: Digital ICE only removes the smallest of dust. Hi-pitched whining when scanning, but not too loud.
Summary: Just received my new 5400 II. This is my first experience with a dedicated film scanner - so take this for what it's worth. My intent is archiving thousands of 35mm color slides and making occasional prints. Rarely will it be used for color negs or B&W.
My setup: HP Pavillion P4 2.6Ghz with 1GB ram; Win XP home - for reference
Installation: No problems what so ever; quick and easy.
Software: Have no experience with Vuescan or Silverfast... but unlikely I will buy them because the included SW suits my needs. I have Vistascan for UMAX flatbed and the Dimage sw is far superior. It did take a few minutes and practice scans to learn the SW, but it's fairly intuitive. Have to read the manual to learn things like some functions only work on 8bit and not 16bit scans. Manual could be more detailed, but sufficient.
Operation: Prescans are fast! Scanner sounds mechanically solid, but again, a slightly hi-pitched whine from motors. Not too loud and doesn't bother me. 35mm slide holder works well - holds slides secure and captures 100%.
Scanning:
Index scan with 4 slides - 40sec.
Prescan, default settings, 1slide - 8sec.
Scan, default settings, 2700 dpi 1 slide - 38sec.
Scan, ICE, GEM(50), 2700dpi - ~3min.
Scan, ICE only - 1min 12s.
Scan, GEM only - 2min.
Features: I like the auto-crop feature and the Point autofocus. Both autofocus modes work great and I don't think I'll mess with manual focus. Digital GEM works great to take out the grain/noise in those blank areas like sky. There's a very, very, slight softening to the image only noticed at 200% in Photoshop. Small amount of unsharp mask in post-processing works.
Levels and curves nice to look at before scan, but I'll do all my adjustments in Photoshopt. Doing levels in Dimage SW causes gaps in the histagram when opened in Photoshop. Bottom line is that the color and exposure is great and any tweaks will be done later.
Haven't played with batch utility yet nor with Dig ROC or SHO (shadow detail).
Biggest eye opener was how much microscopic crap is on my slides! Again, Digital ICE only works on the smallest stuff and still requires dust removal methods in PhotoShop.
Overall, I'm very happy with this purchase, operation and results of this scanner.Updated
Forgot to mention the dynamic range. So far, I've found good detail in the shadows with no noise. But haven't scanned a lot of slides so far and will also try the multi-pass feature to reduce noise in the shadows.
Lastly, the max dpi of 5400 is a key feature allowing large prints from little ole 35mm slides. For most purposes - and disk space, I'll probably use 2700dpi. But when I need it, I'll have it!
