Vuescan vs. Silverfast SE/Ai

[Kirk Gittings]

"With the new Silverfast, the registration is usually perfect, even at 16 scans." Though I only find 16X necessary on images with large shadow areas.

My experience too, though ecery once in awhile I get an out of register one maybe one in 15. It maybe do to humidity changes from heat during the scan or something because the next scan of the same negative will be fine.

[Ed Richards]

I have testing leaving the negative in the scanner for while before scanning, but then the heat from the bulb would not be on. Perhaps the best bet would be to do two in a row, with the first as preheat for the second.

[Karl-Heinz Zahorsky]

The combination of SilverFast SE Plus and SF HDR ist a powerful and economic solution

SilverFast SE Plus has our patented Multi-Sampling function and also supports scanning into raw 48 bit HDR data. So you can create a noise free full dynamic range scan. Then you open the data in SilverFast HDR and quickly optimize your images and run the final processing with the SF HDR JobManager.

More detailson SF SE Plus can be found here: http://www.silverfast.com/show/silverfast-seplus/en.html

and on SF HDR here: http://www.silverfast.com/show/silverfast-hdr/en.html

Ian Lyons tutorials on working with SF HDR: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/hdr_tutorial/hdr_1.htm

[Ed Richards]

> Is there a way to incorporate single pass multisampling into Vuescan?

The current version has this, if your scanner will support it. It will do multi-sampling in a single pass on my 9950. The downside is that multi-sampling is so slow at 4800 that the heat will pop the negative. Works much better at 2400 because there is so much less data to move, but then you can just scan at 4800 and down sample for the same effect. (Scanning at 4800 is not really 4800, but it is a very efficient multi-sample for 2400.)

> A way to reduce noise (and possibly to increase dynamic range by a tiny ammount) is just to oversample. Scan at the full sampling frequency of the scanner (4800 ppi) and have the scanning software downsample. Vuescan will do this; I'd be surprised if silverfast didn't too.

Silverfast will fool you - if you select 4800 and select downsampling, it just scans at a lower resolution, at least on the 9950.