Scanning XPan - Tested

berci

berci

Photographer Level: ****
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Nov 30, 2004
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Hey Guys/Gals with GAS and without GAS,

No need to buy a medium format or a flatbed scanner to scan your XPan slides.

The Minolta Scan Dual IV does the job perfectly, you have to scan the panoramic image in two halves and then stitch them together (Photoshop Elements - Photomerge).

Works well.

Here is an example, a friend of mine in the Bukk Mountains (Hills) in Hungary.

The original is on Fuji Sensia 100.
 
Looks good to me. I often wondered if that would work with the X-pan. as I have had decent luck with photomerge trying to create a pano from two 35 negs.

Bob
 
Yeah, it's great and this scanner is cheap and has a • Dynamic Range: 4.8D, which is great when you scan slides.
 
Hey Pherdinand,

Lili, but has a couple of sisters. One of them might be Iza.
Iza what?

I have just found such a boys only loo here in London.

Berci
 
No idea about her family name. She works in physics, was in the States for awhile, and in the Netherlands too. She really really looks like 'Lili'.
 
No, definitely not.
Might be a lost and forgotten twin sister or a clone, which is more likely.
:)

Is it not annoying overt there, all the natives walking in their clogs while eating cheese and sniffing tulips? ;)

I think I need a coffee.
 
berci:

Thanks for the tip. I've never used photomerge before (and don't -- yet? -- have an Xpan), so I was wondering how easy it is to do? How long does it take for a typical "stitch"? Would you attempt this with dozens of Xpan images or would it simply take too long?

Thanks.
 
Looks very good, Berci, and I cannot tell where the stitch is made. This will be convenient for you, and save the expense if a MF scanner!
 
You have to scan the slide in too runs(with exactly the same settings), left and then right, this means you have to realign the slide in the holder, which can be slightly time consuming.

When you have the two half files there comes Photoshop. I have tested it on two different machine. One is a 3.6 GHz P4 with 1GB ram and it took less than a second and on a P3 500MHz with 512MB ram and it took 1-2 seconds on it.

I guess it is still slower then on a dedicated medium format scanner but this scanner gives you an excellent quality scan for much less.
 
berci said:
You have to scan the slide in too runs(with exactly the same settings), left and then right, this means you have to realign the slide in the holder, which can be slightly time consuming.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Having never scanned slides before, do you have to modify the slide holder at all to do this? I've read that, for film, you have to cut off one of the dividers on the film holder.
 
Don't have to modify the filmholder. Just use the film strip holder. The length of an XPan panoramic slide is shorter than two 24x35 together. So first you scan the left 24x36 part of the XPan image, then after realigning the film in the holder you can scan the other half with some overlap which makes it ideal for stitching.
 
berci said:
Don't have to modify the filmholder. Just use the film strip holder. The length of an XPan panoramic slide is shorter than two 24x35 together. So first you scan the left 24x36 part of the XPan image, then after realigning the film in the holder you can scan the other half with some overlap which makes it ideal for stitching.
Click to expand...

Thanks. This helps a lot -- saves a bunch of money on a scanner (that maybe I can then use towards an Xpan).
 
The same here, I have already got the XPan but no scanner. I did the testing on a friend's Minolta which is now around £220 here in the UK and I think it's far better than any of the Epsons.
 
I picked up an Epson 4180 on Monday, and found it to work pretty well. I don't have access to a
dedicated film scanner to compare to unfortunately, but with Vuescan (which I tried but have not
yet purchased) scanning the XPan panos is quite easy.

It would be interesting to compare the image quality of the scanners at some point, though.
 
Hi There - my first post to this forum :)

I have owned a Hasselblad Xpan since 1999 - just after they first came out, and for years I have been waiting for an affordable yet hi-resolution solution to my scanning woes.

My question is to the original poster, do you know if the Minolta DiMage 5400 would work just as well as the Minolta Dual IV?

I have sent an email to Konica/Minolta Australia to see if they know the answer. I guess the answer is YES, if the mechanism for loading/scanning film is the same.
 
markss said:
Hi There - my first post to this forum :)

My question is to the original poster, do you know if the Minolta DiMage 5400 would work just as well as the Minolta Dual IV?

I have sent an email to Konica/Minolta Australia to see if they know the answer. I guess the answer is YES, if the mechanism for loading/scanning film is the same.
Click to expand...

I own a 5400 and have done a couple of scans with it (newbie Xpan user :cool: )
It works exactly as with the Dual IV.

One difference between the Dual IV and the 5400 is that the 5400 can use 16 bits per channel, while the Dual IV can use only 8. I have Photoshop Elements 2.0 that only supports 8-biy so the scans are downsampled to 8-bit when loaded. The "pro version" of photoshop supports 16-bit, but then you have to do the merge manually.

Perhaps there are users with more recent versions of Elements that can tell if it supports 16-bit? Or perhaps more recent versions of Photoshop CS has the automatic merge available in Elements?

Regards,
Otto
 
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