Dear All
I was a little distressed when Walt W came out with the information
that manual focus was much better than the autofocus on his Minolta
Dimage Scan Elite 5400. I envisaged hours and hours of re-scanning all
my wonderful images (well someone has to think that they're wonderful
;-)) to get the best from them.
I had a go with Vuescan's manual focus facility, but there was no
indication how I was doing without rescanning every time I tweaked the
control; this looked like doubling the time it would take me to re-scan
each image. So I wound up the Minolta software with Import in
Photoshop (7.1 on a Mac in OSX). Sure enough, there was a better
system for manual focus: a bar extends further for better focus. And I
tried it yesterday as a comparison with the autofocus ... it was
certainly noticeably better with manual focus.
So I compared 2 scans of the same slide (Provia 400F, OM4 with 50/1.8
MIJ). Aside from the different colour balance, the focus looks about
the same. So, does Vuescan do a better job of autofocus than Minolta's
software? Why does the Minolta software, if it can indicate varying
degrees of focus with a little bar, not improve its own focus
automatically?
To allow you to make your own judgement, I have put the 2 scans on a
website:
http://www.threeshoes.co.uk/temp_pics.htm
It's all marked to show you which is which. The thumbnails on this
page are 350 pixels wide, the larger files linked to these are 700
wide. The photo is of my brother, a woodsman in Mountshannon, Co Clare
fooling about with bunch of lfowers. The exposure was 1/250 at ƒ4, and
I am prepared to accept that it is a bit soft, either through inept
focusing on my part or perhaps through movement. But I do not believe
that either image is better than the other because of the scanning
focus system.
Comments on the html (use of Dreamweaver) or anything else would be
welcome. I can make the pages smaller if anyone really wants me to. I
use a Mac with the monitor's gamma set to 2.2, but I should be
interested to hear from Windoze users if the display is dark.
Cheers
Chris
<|_:-)_|>
C M I Barker
Cambridgeshire, Great Britain.
+44 (0)7092 251126
ftog at threeshoes.co.uk
http://www.threeshoes.co.uk
http://homepage.mac.com/zuiko
... a nascent photo library.
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