The Minolta DiMAGE Scan
Elite 5400 film scanner

A readers review by Mike Nunan

Page 4.

Tomorrow I will report on the "Fujichrome from Hell" torture test (with another comparison against the Multi Pro) and hopefully run some more scans to check out the handling of garden-variety E6 frames and colour negs, both easy and nasty

I spent yesterday evening doing C-41 neg scans only. I had two frames that fall under the category of torture tests, but the rest were run-of-the-mill material. I'm not going to go into detailed discussions of the results for each frame at this stage, because I will be in a position to upload a raft of sample images tomorrow morning.

The only comment I will make on yesterday's scans is that I encountered my first disappointment with the Minolta's performance. The frame in question is a group portrait, taken in a park at sunset. The Nikon never produced a satisfactory result from this frame and I had high hopes that the Minolta would do the job. While it's a lot better than the Nikon's attempt, it still fails to clear my personal quality bar. Noise and posterization artifacts are clearly present in many key areas of the frame despite a very smooth histogram appearance. Anyway, watch this space for more details tomorrow.

The files are named according to a simple convention. The first part of the name is just the title of the image (e.g., "Ancona port view"). For the detail shots, you'll see something like "(detail)" or "(detail 100pc)" following the title. 100pc means 100%, so you are seeing actual scanned pixels in those files. The ones that say just "(detail)" are at an intermediate level of magnification, so you can get a better feel for the 100pc fine detail image. In the end I didn't feel it was necessary to do too many intermediate files, however. Where I have altered the gamma in Levels, you'll see something like "g+1.5", which simply means I typed 1.5 into the middle text box in Levels. Where the letters "GD" appear in the file name, that image has been captured using Grain Dissolver on the 5400. The end of the filename indicates which scanner was used to capture it. For the 100pc files, remember that the Minolta's resolution is exactly twice that of the LS-30, so the best way to compare images in PhotoShop is to view the 5400 file at 100% and view the LS-30 file at 200%. If you have only the two files open and line up the windows, you can use ctrl+tab to toggle between them quickly.

Many of the images have been gamma boosted, because I felt this would reveal any shortcomings of the scans. I thought it was better to do this to the uncompressed images, rather than leaving it to you to start throwing the levels around after download. If anyone wants more unadjusted images, please let me know.

Many thanks to Mike for making this review and his images available to photo-i.

© Mike Nunan 2003 www.photo-i.co.uk
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