MAJOR update/revision for Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro review!
By
Dave Etchells
(Friday, March 22, 2002 - 09:05 EST)
Dave gets to the bottom of a perplexing problem; scanner review updated as a result...
Well, I have to say I'm glad to have gotten to the bottom of this one! Back when I first tested the Dimage Scan Multi Pro multi-format film scanner, it seemed to do a pretty good job, but was slow when scanning medium-format film at its highest resolution. I was particularly bothered by this because the times I measured were so far at odds with what Minolta claimed for the unit. When I asked them though, they didn't seem to be able to point to anything that would account for the extremely slow performance I was seeing.
Now, nearly 6 months later, I've figured it out: Minolta's Dimage Scan Pro standalone scanning utility seems to have real performance problems on the Mac. (At least on my Mac, anyway.) Having just acquired a speedy 1.8 GHz Pentium IV computer running XP (under which the Multi Pro software supports FireWire), I plugged in the scanner and immediately clocked blazingly fast scan times. Going back to the Mac, I happened to do a scan from within Photoshop (running from within an appropriately huge memory partition), and wonder of wonders, it was even faster!
While the standalone utility has severe performance problems under Mac OS, it works fine under Windows XP, and the Photoshop plugin has no such limitations. The bottom line is that the Dimage Scan Multi Pro has gone from being the slowest medium-format scanner I'd tested to the fastest! Read the review for my new performance timings - This scanner (now) looks like a real winner!
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