Re: [Leica] Anyone been using the DiMAGE 5400?

[Henning Wulff <henningw@archiphoto.com>]

At 9:17 AM -0700 10/13/03, Adam Bridge wrote:
>I'm wondering how this puppy does around issues related to grain 
>aliasing. It's
>attractive because it has a full 16bit imaging system at 5000dpi.
>
>Adam

I have one right now that I'm trying out on a Mac with OSX 10.2. My 
own scanner since it came out has been the Nikon 8000, so that is my 
reference. I've also tried the Nikon 4000.

The Nikon 8000 is considerably better than the 4000 w.r.t. B&W, 
probably because it uses a different type of sensor array (3 rows). 
It suffers from the lack of depth of field the same as the 4000, so 
for any critical work I use the glass holder that I got for MF work.

The 'Konica Minolta' DiMage 5400 is very good both with respect to 
grain aliasing and depth of field. I seems to have no problems with 
any film I have tried with it to date, and does a fine job right into 
the corners. I have tried Tri-X, HP-5 and Delta 100 all recently 
developed in Xtol, as well as old 1960's Tri-X souped in D-76 and 
Acufine, FP4 in Perceptol and the old High Contrast Copy and H&W's 
film in their developer. No aliasing artifacts noticed.

What was interesting was that even HP5, shot at 800 and developed in 
Xtol, showed more detail with the Minolta than the same frame scanned 
on the 8000. The finer grained films obviously showed more detail. 
The 5400 can also penetrate deeper into the denser negative areas, so 
even in the severely overexposed areas some gradations are still 
visible, well after the Nikon has given up.

Mechanically, the unit is well made, and the film holders are of a 
much better and probably longer lasting design than Nikon's.

Scan times were fast (about 1-1/2 minutes to get a 72Mb 16 bit 
grayscale image). I used the firewire port, as I don't have a USB 2 
port. Speeds should be comparable. This was faster than the Nikon, 
which produced a 40Mb 16 bit grayscale tiff file in about 2-1/2 
minutes, also over firewire.

The software seems to be reasonable, and was as good as anything to 
work with. I used version 1.1.1, which I got off the web. I didn't 
load the stuff from the CD, nor the Photoshop Elements that it comes 
with, but used Photoshop 7 instead.

So much for the good stuff.

There is no strip or bulk loader available. :-(

At first, I plugged everything in, and started the standalone 
software. It said that either no scanner was attached, or that some 
other software was using the scanner. I had plugged the firewire into 
a hub, as I have a total of 8 firwire devices, and only two ports on 
the machine. My older Epson flatbed scanner is somewhat fussy, so it 
gets the virgin port on the computer while everything else goes 
through a hub or is daisy chained.

I tried plugging it into the port on the machine directly, and 
rebooted the machine just for good measure. Otherwise I only reboot 
about once a month, and I haven't had a kernel crash for 10 months.

This worked, and the scanning software worked fine. I played around, 
and made a number of scans which were all easy to adjust in 
Photoshop. I then quit the software, and tried starting again. No go. 
Had to reboot. Then the software recognized the scanner again. I 
tried Vuescan, which now has support for the 5400. This is 
non-workable at the moment, because whatever you do, Vuescan wants to 
'warm up' the lamp for about 3 minutes. It takes you nearly 25 
minutes to get one scan. I gave up after one scan (which was fine).

I then tried the photoshop plugin, but it works essentially the same 
as the standalone utility (which is what the plug-in calls), but 
seems even flakier.

The final straw came when Photoshop froze, and also locked up the 
whole machine in the middle of setting up the plug-in, so that I had 
to hard boot the system. When I booted up again, nothing on either 
firewire port was visible (Nikon scanner, four hard drives, CD drive, 
printer etc) including the Minolta. Things didn't get back to normal 
until I unplugged the Minolta scanner.

So. The hardware seems great, but the firmware on the scanner doesn't 
do things right as far as I can tell. The USB 2 connection might be 
better, but I would have to buy a card (third party of course) and 
I'm not sure I want to try that. If you want to use the firewire 
port, I wouldn't consider the scanner until they offer a firmware 
upgrade. USB 1.1 might work, but with 72Mb for a grey scale scan, and 
over 200 Mb for a colour scan at max resolution, this is a solution 
for masochists only.

- -- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com
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