Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/04/23

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Subject: [Leica] Polaroid SprintScan Question
From: Michael Bell <mbell@mail.utexas.edu>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 08:05:21 -0500

I posted this to the Scan list and received no responses.  I'm hoping
someone here might have some ideas.  I promise most of the slides and
negatives I scan are made with Leicas!

- --------

Where I work we have a Polaroid SprintScan 35 LE.  When I  scan slides they
are coming out fairly dark and detail is lost in the shadow areas.  I can
turn up the brightness in the settings, but then the blacks look faded and
I am still losing detail.  I can restore the blacks in Photoshop, but I
still have the feeling something is not right.  When we first got the
scanner a year or so ago I seem to remember a well exposed slide would need
very little adjustment.  Now, they all need to be lightened and tinkered
with.

Negatives don't seem to be affected quite so badly, but the highlights are
tending to block up and lose detail.  If a negative is dense enough it can
be quite difficult to deal with, sometimes impossible, even though it is
printable in a conventional darkroom.

When the scanner was first installed in the lab, the person running the lab
insisted that it be left on all the time.  He's gone now and I make sure
the scanner is off when not in use.  The original bulb had turned pretty
dark.  I put in a new bulb hoping that would fix my problems, but that
helped little if at all.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

thanks

Michael Bell
MBell@mail.utexas.edu