> I am actually quite disappointed by the poor quality scans of the
> slides by the HP photoscanner. In contrast, no pun intended,
> negatives look really good.
Benson,
I'm late to this thread, but Vuescan will do a much better job than the HP
software with both slides and negs on the PhotoSmart. On your machine, one
thing Vuescan does with slides is render shadows dark, because--I think--there
is no way to eliminate noise in the dense areas. And unfortunately, you can't
do multiple passes on the S20.
I ended up getting around this problem by accident, when I wanted to archive
some old family slides taken by a neighbor. Instead of lugging my film scanner
to NJ, I took a bellows/slide unit and copied the lot onto color neg. Later I
batch scanned them in 5-frame strips, using Vuescan. (And each frame was
uniformly dense, thanks to the TTL flash with my OM-2S/bellows!) I didn't lose
as much with the inter-negative as you might think; the Fuji 400 captured every
grain of the old Kodachromes, got rid of the dark noise, and effectively
compressed the tones, making scanning much easier. Is it the best way to
archivally store a slide? No, but given the limitations of the HP it worked
well for me, and more importantly, took a lot less time. (Slide scanning eats
up more time than darkroom work.)
Morgan
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