[Leica] switched to vuescan.... an early review

[Kyle Cassidy <cassidy@netaxs.com>]

yesterday i found myself batch scanning a bunch of negatives on my ls-30
and was really annoyed that they all looked soft, when the negs were tack
sharp, so, reading all about vuescan on the LUG i downloaded a copy, ran
the test, and immediately sent out my $40 -- it really is better, in
default mode, than my nikon software after much tweaking.

my only real problems with it so far are in the interface:

1) the lack of a "browse" button in the "set default directory" option.

2) the sort of "ledger" control panel where checkboxes do not abound,
rather if you want to batch scan five negs in a strip, you don't click on
five little buttons, you enter "1-5"

3) the lack of obvious brightness/contrast/etc. tools. i found an entry
for gamma

4) my preview pane doesn't work.

5) the fact that it opens up the images in (my case) paint shop pro as
they're done scanning, so that the image window pops to the front while
i'm typing something else.

all this can be fixed in future versions (though they're already on 7 so i
wonder what version 2 looked like).

the scan quality is significantly sharper than the nikon software, even on
single pass (the instructions tell that multiple passes will give better
results).

possibly more later as i knock around on this,

kyle