I thought I'd start a separate thread for a few images.

C&C is always welcome, but bear in mind that I'll probably never use the ME Super again!

I post them mostly just for interest. Most of these were taken on the ME Super, using Konica film, and a fairly mediocre super-zoom of the time, the Sigma A 28-200 F4-5.6. It's a 'one-touch' zoom, with one ring for both focusing and zooming. I still have it, so I'll stick it on the front of the K10D sometime, see what it's like on there.

The scans are all taken using Nikon's supplied software, auto-focus and auto-exposure, with the dust removal ('Digital ICE') set to the higher setting ('fine'). I didn't need to do anything to prepare the negatives. Then I've just cropped the frame out, reduced to 800 pixels from 5959, and applied a little USM.


1989

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/134-036.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/134-000-crsmsh.jpg[/IMG]

And especially for George:

[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/ScannedNegatives/134-001.jpg[/IMG]

More later...

My ME Super doesn't look anything like that. It's been up and down the Lake District Fells - several times; it's been all round the US, and it's lost a lot of paint since I bought it second hand.

And I ain't never selling it. It's too much part of my life.

Good luck, likewise. If you've had it a while, though, you might want to consider whether what it will fetch is worth more to you than its value just sitting there. Just a thought

It does. But I really don't think we'd want to go back to it.

Trust me here. Else, send me your negs to scan, for a very reasonable fee.

Much as I love the assembled company to bits, if you think I'm mad enough to share out my meagre 30 (not 32, that was George's optimistic invention) bottles of malt amongst the lot of you, then I'm a long way from being the nuttiest of the fruitcake ingredients here present.

However, I'm now romping through the neg strips, and even though I'm far from being as undrunk as my whisky cabinet, I might see about posting one or two of the things I've happened across in the first 300 or so frames.

I warn you, there are more sheep.

Thank you !!!

I've done about 9 strips now, not a single error. Cautiously optimistic, now, in fact.

Might even break out the whisky later...

I've answered 'digital', since I can't see myself going back to film.

However, as you may have noticed from my ongoing saga of negative scanning, I've been looking at my old photographs for the first time in 20+ years.

They're nowhere near as sharp as my digital pics taken since the beginning of '07 (all with the K10D), not least because I was using mostly a very mediocre super-zoom in those days. And any pixel-peeping reveals far more grain than I'm used to seeing now, especially on faster film.

However, I'm loving the dynamic range of film. Shadow detail, and no sodding cyan stripes across the sky with the slightest hint of overexposure.

... and maybe I just have.

Someone with similar errors to mine apparently discovered that on another computer, everything worked perfectly.

So I've fired up my old 'puter (an Athlon 2500+), installed Nikon Scan on it, and in the last hour or so, scanned four strips in batch with (touch wood) not a single error. With at least one error, usually more, per strip, this doesn't look like coincidence to me.

Given that my main 'puter (Quad 6600, 3.3 GHz) is completely trouble-free, including its USB ports, can anyone hazard a guess what the difference might be?

From the other thread..

Sadly, a body upgrade is out of the question for now, since getting the Coolscan 5000.

It was one or the other. The other will now have to wait.

However, I dropped into my local Snappy Snaps just now. Depending on how many you want, they charge about 50p per frame if you want negs scanned. That's £18 per roll of 36 .

I wonder how many people there are around that have wallets of negs sitting in a cupboard that they want scanned, but don't want to either buy a scanner, or pay that.

If I can just get the workflow sorted...

Is the low-light AF with the K20D better than the K10D?

And (anyone that's had both), how does the K-7's low light AF compare with the K20D's?

If there's one thing that would really push me to upgrade it would be if that was substantially better.

Yes, I was surprised too, for the same reasons. From what I read, the Digital ICE feature (dust/scratch removal) isn't available with VueScan, although the latter has its own version, which is not as good. This is my finding, too, so far.

My main problem is that the AF/AE that you get with the Nikon software gives great results every time*, unlike what I've been getting with VueScan.

I'll post some comparative scans when I get a chance; hopefully some wise person will be able to come straight back with "ah, what you're doing wrong is xxx", where xxx is some simple thing that will make me feel temporarily very foolish, but will get me going again properly.

Is that pre- or post-processing?

______

* well, every time it scans at all, that is