> OK, I am not the brightest bulb in the pack. I just found out that > there is such a thing as Vuescan. Does anyone out there use it and > will it improve output from flatbed and film scanners? I have an old > HP Photosmart S20 and an old Canon 660 flatbed. Both work fine but if > the new software would be an improvement I'm game to buy it.
I have the HP Photosmart S20 buried in my attic somewhere and also purchased the Vuescan software back in 2002 when I was still scanning slide film. In short, the difference between Vuescan and the HP software *for me* was hit or miss. In the long run, I found myself sticking with the HP software. However, whenever I came across a slide that didn't "scan well" I'd try it in both, and there were definitely times when the Vuescan software gave me a more pleasing result than the OEM software. The improvement was mostly with shots with lots of shadow detail like this one: http://tinyurl.com/3hhvzb With the OEM software, everything under the falls was black. Mark Cassino also used this combination and I remember him being MUCH happier with the color renderings offered by the HP software vs. Vuescan. He told me that for him shadow detail also got a little better, but vuescan also made getting back to his desired exposure almost impossible at times (that's pretty much a direct quote from an email dated 2002). One big advantage for most scanners wrt Vuescan is that the software allows for multiple passes of the film for each scan. However, here's what I wrote Ed Hamrick (maker of Vuescan) back in 2002... > The current version of Vuescan does not seem to > support multipass scans > with my HP S20 film scanner. To which he responded... > Yes, the rubber rollers in this scanner make it so the film can't > be repositioned accurately for each pass. Since it's a hardware bottleneck for that particular scanner, I'm guessing that's still the case with the S20. So in that respect (once again) I wouldn't expect a world of difference by using Vuescan versus the OEM stuff. HTH, Jerome http://www.celebratelove.us -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
