Re: Looking for advice for a good Digital Ice 35mm slide scanner

Today David Dyer-Bennet commented courteously on the subject
at hand

OK. Good to know. By now, you've undoubtedly noticed that
besides being rigid at times, I am /very/ detail oriented.
<grin> So, again I will buy locally only, I would ask the
sales guy to pull the thing out of the box and show me; I
know he doesn't have them on display. So, no guarantees,
but I probably would've seen the single holder. But, you
saved me a ton of grief because I'll be mentally prepared
for big bucks instead of getting the bad news the day I
whip out my Visa card.

Your attitude is within line-of-sight from where I sit;
you're not me, but you're not out-of-sight weird at all;
you *make sense* to me.

Thank you for that complement, David. Unfortunately for me, my
oft-poor judgment has created a bad image of someone who is
rigid and close-minded to accepting help, but that isn't the
real me.

Yeah, facing an unexpected 3x price increase when you
thought you were ready to buy can ruin the whole day.

I was flush with the idea of a $600 solution with the Coolscan
V ED this afternoon thinking I could live with 4 at a time to
save some bucks. Not. Much better, though, to hear the bad
news now and get over it, than to find that out when I forced
the camera store guy to pull the scanner.

$1000 for a consumer scanner? Wow! There must be
"consumers" with a whole lot more money than me! I thought
a "consumer" scanner was a little $100 USB flatbed.

Well, they're not the scanners that photo labs buy, for
example. I do know a fair number of professional
photographers who sometimes use them, though, so maybe I
shouldn't be so definite about the categorization.

I didn't mean to suggest that. But, $900 for a Rebel XT body
is enough to satisfy my needs for documentary photography of
cars, but I've invested in a Canon flash and some Canon glass
to get the best of my investment. I have no need for a new
Canon 5D at about $4K, and even if I could get better pics, I
wouldn't like of it's lack of a built-in flash for those
occasions I just want to shoot snapshots. No pro would do
that, nor would a pro buy a Rebel except for casual use.

In this NG, people run the gamut from newbies to pros with 40
years experience, computer amatuers to systems experts, and
those wanting a $100 scan solution for everything vs. a pro
trying to convert 10,000 studio negs to digital before the
color dyes get any worse.

In the car biz, my field, I tell people that it doesn't take a
high performance car like my 2006 Charger HEMI R/T to be
"exciting." All it takes is whatever vehicle you drive, for
whatever purpose, from any car maker at any price to be
"exciting" is simply for the vehicle to exceed your
expectations for fitness of purpose. I think the same is true
for photographic-anything.

As to neg masking, I clearly bow to your personal
experience. If you say it works, it works. What I was
referring to is that if I do a simple inversion of the RGB
in PSP 9, what I see is a too-blue image, because it
reverses the too-orange Kodak mask, and blows away the
real colors.

I have had no luck attempting to invert it with normal
photo editor actions of any sort either. I believe plugins
and such have been written to do it, but I don't have a
reference handy.

David, I use PSP because I can neither afford PS CS2 nor do I
want to learn it, but PSP has a resize option called
"smartsize", which works best for everything other than those
very special situations and when you know exactly which
resampling algorithm to use whether going up or down. I
analogize that to whatever Nikon is doing.

It is clearly not a simple color inversion, nor is it an exact
color profile, which few other than pros might demand.

I did B&W in the 1960s and 1970s but color in those days
was not only too expensive for me, it was a PITA. But, to
your point, I am like you. I don't write the software, nor
do I care how it is done. I also don't care, really, if
there is a Kodacolor profile or not, so long as Nikon's
software can give me a decent starting point.

Which it can, definitely.

I'm quite comfortable now, thanks to you.

I did darkroom color printing, slightly, in the first half
of the 80s. B&W from 1970-1985. I think I've printed in a
darkroom *once* since 1985 -- I was stuck going through a
lab for quite a while, waiting to build my perfect darkroom
into the house. Sold the house instead.

My wife gave all my darkroom stuff to our church rummage sale
years ago. I took it with me when I moved out of my parent's
house into an apartment, then my first house. But, I never set
it up. Then, I dragged it all to my current house, but never
set it up.

About the only thing I regret giving up is my old enlarger
stand. In my early engineering days, I'd done a "goverment
job" of getting a simple casting machined as an 8" copy stand
adapter to use the enlarger geared head mechanism with my
Nikon FTN and 55mm Nikor Macro lens. If I'd had my wits about
me, I'd have realized that I could've done the same thing now
that I have a decent DSLR, not to scan slides but for the
occasional times where it is easier and faster to rip off a
dozen "scans" of photos with a camera instead of a flatbed
scanner.

Then, again, maybe that old enlarger would have never made it
upstairs...

--
ATM, aka Jerry
.

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