leafscan 45

[Jon Miller]

at what optical DPI (Horizontal and vertical) does the leafscan 45 create scans for 35mm, 6cm x 7cm, and 4" x 5". Its max optical DPI is 5000x5000, which I beli eve applies to 35mm only. Has anybody used this scanner? How nice are the scans? Does it capture good shadow detail and highlight detail?

[TAN K H]

This is from my manual for the scanner:

Format/max. ppi/widthpixels/heightpixels/approx. file size ----------------------------------------------------------

35mm portrait/5080/5080/7400/113mb (After cropping)

35mm landscape/2540/4000/2790/32mb

6x4.5/2540/6000/4500/81mb

6x6/2540/6000/6000/103mb

6x7/2540/6000/7000/126mb

6x9/2540/6000/9000/162mb

6x12/2540/6000/12000/216mb

4x5portrait/1200/4740/4740/67mb (slight crop to top and bottom)

4x5landscape/1200/6000/4740/82mb

The Leafscan is very nice scanner and gives excellent highlights and shadow details (not matching TOL drum scannners of course). But you shouldn't be making 35mm scans with it - its performance is ridiculously slow for that format. For some reason, its a far faster (for the same final file size in a 35mm scan) and far better medium and large format scanner. Note that it has to take 3 passes to make one RGB scan (and the same for one prescan!).

You really need a separate dedicated 35mm scanner for 35mm scans.

Some very real annoyances:

1. Leaf, whilst still supporting the scanner, is not making updates to the very very dated and somewhat clunky driver anymore (and hasn't been for quite a few years already).

2. This very dated driver (a PS plugin) might not work with the current version of Mac OS9x (I can't confirm this since I am still running v8.6) or later and later versions of Photoshop.

3. It uses Beseler negative carriers - some image cropping happens with some formats BY DEFAULT of the smaller negative carrier opening (to full negative frame). And its sometimes hard to center the neg. This may or may not annoy you. It sure as hell annoys me!

A note about file sizes: whilst an 82mb file for a 4x5 scan may not sound like much, if you're making outputs to a CSI Lightjet for big prints, you'd have little to complain about the sufficiency of details. The Lightjet has a very nice interpolation algorithm. Any other large scale interpolation can be done with Genuine Fractals with very very good results as well (though you'd certainly need a screaming fast machine to happily process an 82mb file!)

If you can get one for real cheap ($3000 or less), its a fairly worthwhile LF scanner. Else, if you have about $10,000 plus to spare, I'd suggest an Imacon Flextight. Or just use a service bureau.

Steve Johnson has an old article at his website talking a little about the scanner - mine you, it was written in 1994!

[TAN K H]

Oh yeah, I understand that there *might* have been a few versions of the scanner with slightly different hardware specs. I think mine is the last model but the specifications I have noted could refer to an older model (the manual and machine may not match). Someone once told me the later models had slightly higher hardware resolutions.

You might want to write to Leaf Scitex and ask them.

[Doug Dolde]

Silverfast supports the Leafscan 45 now for both Windows and OS X. You can get 2540 dpi from 4x5 by scanning in two halves then stitching.

[Frank Petronio]

I had one back in the day (Mac OS 7.5 day) - it's a fine scanner but so very slow... dedicate an old computer to running it so you can do something else, then ethernet the files over to your newer box.

[Doug Dolde]

My Leafscan 45 runs fine as a stand alone application on Windows XP and Silverfast. I can work in Photoshop while it's scanning in the background.

Excellent scan quality for the money. I paid $300 for mine (plus Silverfast and a glass mounting kit). I'm wet mounting to the glass with great results. Also very easy to do a two pass scan at 2540 dpi and stitch the halves in Panavue Image Assembler. I get a file that will print 24x30 at 360 dpi.

[nonuniform]

Where did you get the glass mounting kit?


My Leafscan 45 runs fine as a stand alone application on Windows XP and Silverfast. I can work in Photoshop while it's scanning in the background.

Excellent scan quality for the money. I paid $300 for mine (plus Silverfast and a glass mounting kit). I'm wet mounting to the glass with great results. Also very easy to do a two pass scan at 2540 dpi and stitch the halves in Panavue Image Assembler. I get a file that will print 24x30 at 360 dpi.

[sanking]

Where did you get the glass mounting kit?

The glass mounting kit is a product produced many years ago in Japan, in relatively small numbers I believe. Several years ago a fellow from Malaysia acquired the last stock and offered it for sale on the Leafscan forum on Yahoo. I imagine that most of the people who have the glass mounting kit acquired it at that time, though it was around many years before this.

The kit is really just a piece of glass that you use in place of the Beseler or Leaf negative carriers. There are various templates that come on disk in .pdf format that you print out on transparency film. To use, you place the glass mount over the template and fluid mount the negative or transparency to the top of the mount, negative side up. The mount works very well and allows sliding the film for stitching if necessary.

If you go to the Yahoo site you find some information I placed in the file section about dimensions of the glass mount, and also files for the templates. I think it would be fairly easy to have one of these made by a custom glass shop from plain float glass. However, the original was made from sapphire glass for maximum light transmission.

Sandy King

[John Barnes]

Had one and for several years when I shot more 4x5 I loved it. As I stopped using 4x5 and went to 5x7 & 8x10 I sold it. I used it with a G4 Macintosh running OS 9.2.2 and it worked fine. the scanner is processor dependent and will run faster on faster processors however 12 min. scans are about as fast as you can do. Shadow detail is very good and in some cases I was able to scan down to the film grain. It was very large and took up alot of room. Oh yes I had a dedicated machine to run it due to speed.