Silverfast: multisampling vs non-multisampling

[Michael Heald]

Hello! As I've been reading the reviews of the v700 and V750 and waiting for others to come in as I decide on which scanner to purchase, especially compared to the 4990, I decided to demo Silverfast on my Microtek 5900. I had a 4x5 TMax 100 image of a white stone church with dark bare trees around it. I scanned the image with Silverfast at 2400spi, 48 bit color with 8 multisamples samples and a second scan with one sample. I repeated the scan with the Microtek ScanMaker software. I kept the green channel of each image and I gave each image the same adjustments for tone, with minor adjustments for contrast and unsharp mask. The crop is of a stone railing. The noise certainly gives the images a soft appearance. To my eye, it appears that the Silverfast with 8 scans is better than with one scan is better than the Microtek. It took about two hours to do the 8 multisample scan; 10 to 15 minutes for the other two scans each. Best regards.

Mike

[Ron Marshall]

I have found that there is a slight benefit to using multisampling with Silverfast (8x) for B/W negatives. But, as others have found, you must first do a single dummy scan to warm-up the film, otherwise it often moves and the scan is very soft.

[Ed Richards]

If this is a B&W negative, you can speed up the scanning time by using the 16 bit grey mode.

[David Luttmann]

If this is a B&W negative, you can speed up the scanning time by using the 16 bit grey mode.

Because the different channels of most CCD arrays have differing noise characteristics, it is best not to scan in 16 bit grey. It is best to scan in 16 bit RGB, multisampled, and then choose the channel with the least noise, typically the green or blue.

[Tom Westbrook]

Anyone know why Silverfast doesn't support single pass multi-sampling like in Vuescan? Seems like it would save a lot of fiddling around, what with stitching multiple samples and the long wait times to perform multiple scans.