Canoscan FS4000US--anybody noticed image "stretching"?

[DrTebi]

I am wondering if anybody who uses a Canoscan FS4000US has ever noticed that it stretches it's scans. Mine does... I started noticing that sometimes faces and other "known objects" just looked weird, as if the image was resized slightly with "constrain proportions" off.

When I compared the scans with scans from my Minolta scanner, and also from lab scans, I realized that this is true. After a bit of fiddling and math, I concluded that I always need to resize the height of a scan by 4.4 percent (e.g. in Photoshop I uncheck "constrain proportions" and set the width to 100% and height to 104.4%). Then it looks 99.9% correct.

So, does anybody else experience this? Could it be that my motor is a bit messed up?

By the way, it does not matter what OS or scanning software I use, always the same results. Nevertheless, besides this stretching issue, scans look quite nice, even better in color than my Minolta Dimage Multi Pro.

 

[astro8]

My scans look pretty well spot on...could be your aspect ratio.

I'm at 1920 x 1200.

You?

 

[DrTebi]

My scans look pretty well spot on...could be your aspect ratio.

I'm at 1920 x 1200.

You?

Good idea but--it cannot really be my aspect ratio... it's set correctly, and as I mentioned, the scans from the Minolta scanner look correct on the same monitor.

 

[thegman]

Never had that on my FS4000, although it does kind of sound like a hardware fault, say if the motor which moves the film holder was going a little slow, I suppose that would cause the image to stretch a little. Just a guess.

 

[sevo]

My scans look pretty well spot on...could be your aspect ratio.

That would be easy to check by scanning the same object twice, once at 0° and once at 90°, and rotating the latter back in Photoshop. If the scanner is at fault, they'd be even worse out of alignment than a single shot, if it is the display aspect ratio, they'd be matching.

 

[cabbiinc]

I have two Canon FS4000US scanners, two Nikon Coolscans, and two flatbed scanners. One Canon gives "skinnier" scans than the other scanners. I don't have them all set up right now, but the one Canon scans the whole frame but there's less pixels on the short side.

 

[DrTebi]

Thank you, at least now I know I am not crazy and that this appears to happen to someone else as well.

It's really too bad, as I do like the CanoScan scans a lot, nice colors and sharpness.

Anyway, I still use the scanner at times, and to fix the stretching problem, I now always scan in maximum (e.g. no cropping at the scanner software) and then I run an action in Photoshop that resizes the image (I did a few calculations while putting a "correct" scan as a layer over the image). Then I do all the cropping and editing. Works out fairly well.