Minolta 5400 streaks

[Wilfred van der Vegte]

Are you suggesting that Don might not be a candidate moderator?? ;-)

ROTFL

 

[Anoni Moose]

So this would seem to indicate that "calibration" is a hardware or
firmware process residing in the scanner somehow.
If this is true then it seems odd that one program would get streaks
and another won't.

True if you made that assumption. However, speaking as a digital
electronic engineer, that's a very big assumption. The interaction
between the hardware, firmware, and host software could be as
convulated as one wanted it to be for whatever reason thought to
make things work best. What I mean is that you could, if you
really wanted to, have communications between the host software
and the hardware+firmware be DES encrypted with "secret" keys
embedded in the hardware and host software which would make
third party sofware probably out of luck. Not that they would,
put point being it *could* be most anything, so assumptions
may very well lead to improper conclusions. The host software
may participate in the "calibration" activities in a way that
makes no sense if the communcations were being watched (and if one
didn't have the hardware/firmware documentation written up by
the designers). Sometimes folk have trouble understanding even
with the documentation.... So, don't stop guessing, but
try not to get overly excited about conclusions.

Mike

 

[Alan Browne]

Aguyathome wrote:

I bought a 5400 late this past summer and I love it. I do all my scans with 16x
sampling,

Useless to go beyond about 4x.

at 5400dpi, which makes a 233mb that looks incredible. Never had a

30% of that 233 mb is noise.

Only 25% of the 233 mb will make its way onto paper at full res.

streak, but I have had a few scans come out dark and had to re-do them. Other
than that, and the fact that it takes an hour or two to do a single scan at the
highest setting, I wouldn't trade the thing for anything out there. It even

Drop to 2x or 4x and you'll save some time for the equivalent result.

scan better than the $200,000-up drum scanners that we had when I worked at

How many ways are there to say.... b*llsh*t.

Primedia Publishing in the late '90s.

Perhaps the above is meant as humor?

Cheers,
Alan.

 

[Don]

Are you suggesting that Don might not be a candidate moderator?? ;-)

Darn! You beat me to it! ;-)

I was just about to reply with:

"All you have to do is ask nicely and promise to keep it clean...
;o)"

Don.

 

[Rob Landry]

Another observation to add to the mix. If I turn on the 5400 it wants
to be calibrated before use. I then start up the Minolta software and
it does this. I then quite the Minolta scan program and start up
Vuescan. At this point Vuescan recognizes that the scanner has been
"calibrated" and does not attempt to do this again.
So this would seem to indicate that "calibration" is a hardware or
firmware process residing in the scanner somehow.

I've noticed the same thing and this workaround seems to work,
however, if I run the Vuescan calibration again, say 30 minutes later,
Vuescan no longer functions (blank preview) or the histogram is
severely compressed. It does seem as though Vuescan can't
initialize/calibrate the scanner properly on its own.

If you take a look at the Minolta SW or Silverfast, you'll see a
calibration folder with 6 or 7 .BIN files that get updated immediately
after the calibration is complete. Perhaps these calibration files are
what set the Minolta SW and Silverfast apart.

If I start Silverfast demo after Vuescan has become corrupted as
described above, Silverfast's calibration is messed up and the
histogram is severely compressed. Same goes for the Minolta SW.

So it appears to me that Vuescan not only fails to initialize the
5400, it also can wreak havoc on other SW as well. All is solved if I
shut down and re-start my machine.

I sure wish Ed could figure this out because I really like Vuescan
(had it for my other 2 scanners). Silverfast yields nice scans but I
find the interface just gets in the way and besides it's $200 US and
it crashes a fair amount.

 

[Anoni Moose]

A bit more information.

Using the Scan Elite, I scanned a black slide with Vuescan and Minolta's
utility. Pumping up the shadows produced streaks in both scans. The
Vuescan scan had considerably more horizontal lines of various colours
resembling noise. The Minolta scan was pretty clean with a couple of hard
defect lines. I was able with some large bars (multiple pixels) of noise to
match them up in the scans. I was unable to match single pixel lines.

You know, what you talk about here sounds spookly very similar to
something that affects inkjet printers sometimes (where the particular
effect is understood). Is your scan in 8-bit mode or 16-bit mode?

The effect in printers (where there is a differnce, but not sure if
it affects things) is where an area of relatively constant color (like
in skies) can show streaky-patterns due to quantizing effects and/or
for emphasis of those effects by contrast (or curve) "improvements".
They take nearby values and shift such that values quantize into
buckets of same-value and it shows as streaks. For the printers it
was a matter of not doing the image manipulation or to go to 48-bit
mode so that the changes don't make areas "slip" to the same values.

There may be no relationship, but the similarity seems striking
particularly with the "pumping up" part.

Mike

 

[David O'Rourke]

I'm familiar with the banding that you refer to. This isn't the same issue
with these Minolta scanners. The most visible defeat(s) is a single pixel
wide artifact the runs the length of the scan in the direction of scanning.
They can be any colour, but yellow casts are the easiest to spot. Numbers
wise it might read -3 blue and +1 red relative to the surrounding colours,
but it will read this error for the length of a scan.

Pumping up the shadows just makes it easy to find the defects, but some
times all it takes is a transparency that has areas approach Dmax of the
film and these defects will be seen.

David

 

[MPA]

It's OK if he doesn't have time to run it but it would be nice if he
would participate. Did he say anything about that?
The fact that yahoo groups require to be run by a moderator might be a
pro. OTOH, the moderator should be someone who is unbiased, which seems
difficult when it comes to VueScan.

Alternatives could be http://www.photo.net/community/forums or
http://www.photo-i.co.uk/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.pl

http://forums.delphiforums.com/pancams/start
is an alternative but images can only be displayed in the paid version.

 

[bnballison2]

streaks on scanners

hmm, good news and bad news. The streaks are from dust on the internal mirror that bounces the light back into the sensor. The bad news is that its nearly impossible to clean the mirror perfectly. Apparently these high resolution scanners are much more sensitive to the dust reflection compared to the old 150 dpi scanners of yesteryear.