Pat, Are there people on this list still scanning!? I thought film dried out in the digiland... ;o) I wouldn't know about HP, but certainly the Minolta scanner software is a joke when it comes to scanning negatives. Apparently it heavily cuts the tones from both ends of the histogram with no manual control from the user. Its "raw" images result with burnt out highlights and black shadows, and even worse, with added noise that someone might take it mistakenly fro grain. Worst of all is that it does the processing on a per-frame base, so that two consecutive frames identically exposed but differing by, say, the area the sky occupies, result in different hues and contrast.
Vuescan on the other hand allows access to the entire latitude of the negative and consequently produces much more smooth images. Grain is much less noticeable. Also results are quite consistent on the same roll. For best consistency you might want to scan the first empty frame of the roll and lock exposure and base color. I agree though its user interface has a steep learning curve. Servus, Alin Pat wrote: PK> Thanks to discussion on the list, I'm trying the Vuescan demo. I'm quite PK> surprised at the differences produced by Vuescan and the scanner's own PK> software. I am using an HP Photosmart S20 scanner. I scanned one roll of PK> color negative film w/ the HP software and re-scanned using the Vuescan PK> software. PK> The scans from the HP software were really dark & murky and would need some PK> work in Photoshop. The dust particles were also more apparent. The Vuescan PK> files are much brighter and colorful and dust less pronounced (I did not PK> particularly go out of my way to dust off the negatives or the scanner PK> between scans). The HP software is much more intuitive to use. Even after PK> reading the Vuescan directions, I spent over 30 minutes trying to get the PK> crop box properly aligned before scanning. The results seem to be worth the PK> effort, though. Will need to try a couple more scans.
