Julian, I can avoid the 'meat-grinder' noises with my LS4000 by setting Vuescan's preview resolution to 2000ppi. That slows the innards down somewhat and they don't make such horrible noises!
After comparing NS and VS, I have ended up using them together. I use NS in standalone mode, with Color Management switched off, gamma set to 1 (for highbit files), and ICE on. Then I save the raw file and process it in VS. You need to set gamma to 1, as VS uses this setting for highbit files. I process the raw file in VS six times, using the 'whitebalance', 'neutral', and 'none' settings with either 'image' or 'slide' selected. Then I look at these six files in PS and select the best for processing further. There doesn't seem to be any logic in which will give the 'best' results, and it doesn't take much time to process from disk. Why do I do this? Because I have found that NS gives me better results with ICE and GEM than VS, while VS gives me better color processing than NS and also allows me to output the files in EktaSpace which NS doesn't. Bob Frost. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Julian Vrieslander" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Glad to hear that your LS-8000 makes "reassuring sounds". My LS-4000 sounds like a meat grinder chewing on a tin can. At first I thought something was horribly wrong with it, but others claim this is normal. I do see quite a few shots where NS gives an acceptable result from its default/automatic settings. But there are many where the results are way off. The color balance and/or exposure are wrong, and I need to twiddle curves, levels, and analog gain to make things right. As others have noted, NS frequently chops off shadow detail - you can see this as abrupt cuts on the left side of the histograms. Changing the black point settings does not seem to fix this. I suspect there is a bug in the software. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body