The scanner showed up and so I’ve started scanning slides in earnest this week.  So far I’ve been pretty pleased with the results.  The only time the scanner fails, miserably, is in shots that are mostly of the ground with a lot of rocks (as is commonly found in the Southwestern U.S.).  A lot of the pictures I’ve been scanning are slides that my Dad took when he was following up on mining claims on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon prior to the creation of Lake Powell.  So there are a lot of “rocky” pics that the scanner’s built in “Digital ICE” feature cannot handle – it ends up altering the picture so much it looks like it’s been put through one of PhotoShop’s Mosaic filters. So I have to turn off the “Digital ICE” on those pics.  Also, when using “Digital ICE” it increases the scan time by what seems like ten-fold.  But on most pictures, it’s well worth it.

Otherwise, it does a phenomenal job.  One picture in particular was nearly black and I was able to recover it back to a point where you could recognize the people in the photo.  It was obvious that it had a lot of processing done to it, but it was acceptable.  Certainly much better than the original I had to work with.  Once I get some more work done, I will try to post some samples here.  If you’re one of my Facebook Friends, you can see some of the results already in my “Stuff Under Lake Powell” album.

I just noticed one more problem with the scanner.  Most of the shots I’ve been working on are in “Red Rock” country, and since the programming is obviously biased towards avarages, it screws up the color when all the rocks/ground are tinted red, forcing a noticible shift towards green.  If the photo has a good mix of sky, ground, and foliage – it’s spot on, but if the photo is 80% or more dominated by one color family (other than sky – which the programming seems to compensate for correctly) the colors seem to get shifted wrong.  Which is unfortunate, since 90% of the pics I’m working on have red rock cliffs/ground.

I hope things are progressing well towards your Holidays – Enjoy!