| Product: Dimage Scan Dual film scanner
|
Company: Minolta |
| Web: www.minoltausa.com |
Phone: 800-962-2746 |
| Platform: Windows/Mac with SCSI |
SRP: US$450
Street Price: US$375 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
Perhaps you've noticed how the price of digital cameras has been
dropping every year, and their resolution has been steadily
increasing. Maybe you've been thinking that they're as good as
traditional film cameras by now and that there's no reason not to go
digital. I have two words that might convince you otherwise: film
scanners.
A film scanner is a specialized piece of equipment. It can't scan
your old prints, papers or most of the other things an inexpensive
flatbed scanner can; it only scans film (and usually slides). And it
does a much better job than a flatbed scanner. When you make a
print from a negative or slide, you lose some resolution and a lot of
dynamic range. When you scan the print, you lose another level of
image quality. Even if you have the best flatbed scanner in the
world, you're never going to be able to pull as much information from
a photo as you could from the film the photo was made from. If you've
got old slides or negatives to scan, a film scanner is the way to go.
Minolta's Dimage Scan Dual is an affordable film scanner that accepts
35mm slides and negatives. With an optional adapter, it also takes
APS film. It has a resolution of 2430 dpi, which works out to about
24MB of data for a 35mm image and 15MB for APS. This is *much* higher
than any digital camera you can buy without mortgaging your house,
and it's good enough for an 11" x 17" print -- if your photo is sharp
enough to use at that size.
The Dimage Scan Dual is about 3" x 6" x 10," about the size of a
thick external hard drive sitting on its side. There's an opening
about 3/8" wide by 2 1/2" high that you feed the film holder through.
Unfortunately, it's an *open* hole; there's nothing to keep dust,
moisture or pet hair out of the mechanism. This was a poor design
choice, because at 2400 dpi, the slightest contaminant is visible in
the scan. Dirty film is a problem in a regular darkroom too, but
anything that would help keep the scanner's interior clean would've
been welcome.
There are a couple of other annoying problems with the hardware design. The
power switch is in the back of the unit instead of on the front or
side. The scanner's SCSI ID and termination are set using dip
switches instead of a dial or button.
Another area where the Dimage Scan Dual falls short is in the driver
software. There's no way to sugarcoat it: it's lousy, perhaps the
worst scanning software I've ever used. It doesn't look or behave the
way most other scanning software does. That's all well and good if
you're improving usability or adding functionality, but that's just
not the case here. You can't scan a portion of an image as a preview,
there's no way to save default color settings, and there's no
provision for batch scanning. Many of the settings can't be typed in
directly, forcing you to move onscreen sliders back and forth in a
quest for precision. There's no sharpening function, a major
oversight in a scanner that doesn't let you adjust focus. When your
cursor lingers over a button, some text appears with an explanation
of the button's purpose -- but it appears in another window rather
than below the button as it should. In fact, the Preview window may
even cover that window completely. And some of the buttons have
cryptic icons that give no clue about their function.
All that said, the Dimage Scan Dual does a good job with the actual
scanning. Previews take about fifteen seconds and a full scan at
maximum resolution takes around 90 seconds. The scans are a bit
dark, but image quality is fine otherwise. By tweaking the settings
in the prescan window, it's possible to get scans that are great
instead of just pretty good.
In the end, Minolta's Dimage Scan Dual is a decent film scanner with a few
design flaws and awful software that unfortunately gets in the way of the scanning
process. Novice users may become frustrated with its difficulty, and
professionals will quickly bump up against its limitations.
If price alone is your most important purchasing criteria, the Dimage
Scan Dual can perform well with a little effort on your part. There
are only a few scanners in this low-end price range, so choice is limited. For serious shutterbugs, don't
be too discouraged, there are much better scanners out there, you'll just have to pay a lot more for them. The good news is, you're more likely to get a better designed machine that works with, rather than against, you.
Click here to see a sample image scanned with the Scan Dual.
- Andrew Sasaki [9/15/99]
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