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Minolta Dimage Scan Multi PRO
A Review by Peter Wolff
Minolta has updated their multi-format scanner again, this time to the Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro. This scanner is competing with the Nikon 8000 ED and the Polaroid 120 and, of course, the Imacon scanners, although they are still in a different league. I've been reading many reviews and comments on these scanners in order to decide which one to buy. I finally settled for the Minolta for a number of reasons, including price and image quality.
Technical Data
The Multi Pro is a multi-format scanner (as the name implies). It can scan 35mm and medium format up to 6x9. Other formats like 16mm film and APS can be scanned using optional film-holders. The resolution is 4800 DPI optical for 35mm and 3200 DPI optical for medium format. A good combination of very high resolution on the small format and a bit less resolution on the bigger format. It's a true 16 bit scanner, which means that it can deliver 16 bits for each color as output. Other scanners can do this also, but the Minolta is scanning with 16 bits internally also, whereas the competitors (Nikon, Polaroid and Imacon) are scanning with 14 bits. This should give a better DMax. The advertising material says a DMax of 4.8 (which simply is Log10(2^16), see www.scantips.com for more details on this subject), while the manual says 4.2 tested value. This scanner includes the ICE3 technologies from Applied Science Fiction and it offers support for dust removing, grain removing and color restoration.
The Hardware
The Multi Pro is a rather small scanner, at least compared to Nikon and Polaroid. The scanner is seen here next to a Nikon F90x.
As it can be seen it will easily fit on almost any desk. There are only two
buttons on the front; a power button and an eject button. On the back you'll
find connections for SCSI as well as Firewire. The film holders
are very easy to use and they have a rather rugged design using hard plastic.
You don't get the feeling that you can break these holders easily. Film holders
for 35mm strips, 35mm mounted slides and 120 film (max. 6x9) are part of the
standard package.
The Film Holders:
The 35mm strip and slide holders.
The 120 film strip holder.
As it can be seen, the 120 film holder can easily hold 3 frames of 6x6 without
any clipping needed. The holder shown above is the glassless holder, but for
curled film there is a glass holder with anti-Newton ring glass.
The 120 film glass holder on the left and the glassless holder on the
right. These are inserts that fit into the larger holder seen above. I try to
keep my slides very flat and I haven't needed the glass holder yet.
All in all the hardware seems to be of good build-quality.
Installation
I'm using Windows 98 SE and therefore I have to use the SCSI connection, since Minolta does not provide drivers for the Firewire connection on Windows98. No SCSI or Firewire card was provided, so I had to buy a SCSI controller card. The Minolta web site suggests some Adaptec cards that can be used, but I took a chance and bought a very inexpensive card called ACARD AEC-6710S for about $30. The installation of the card went without any problems and so did installation of the scanner software. The scanner was found first time from the TWAIN software used via PhotoShop, and I made my first scan within minutes from starting out. I'm running Windows98 SE on a Pentium III 866MHz with 512Mb RAM.
The Software
Before going into details regarding the software I must say that it has never crashed or "misbehaved" in any way yet, so it seems as stable as the hardware. However, having said that I must say that the software seems a bit simpler that you would expect. But for scanning slides is works well and you will get correct colors. The software is build around a few main sections called "Index", "Prescan" and "Image Correction". The Index section will scan all 35mm films that are in the holder, be it the strip holder or the slide holder.
In the Prescan section you can scan one of the frames or the entire frame
if its 120 film. You can then crop and re-focus the pre-scan if needed. Focus
can be set manually or to automatic. The auto-focus is very good, however it
will always focus at one given (by the user) place on the frame, and if
the film is just a bit curled you might like to focus manually on one
spot.
The manual focus on the preview scan is made very easy — you simply have to
align two bars (white and black) to the maximum size you can get.
The Image Correction section is where you can alter levels, brightness
and contrast and you can make variations in colors, etc. I will not go into this
section, simply because I don't use it — I prefer to alter these things in
Photoshop.
So far I have used the ICE dust-removal function for 35mm film only, but it can also be used for medium format and the results are pretty amazing. After using ICE you only have to spot the image for larger dust areas which ICE can not handle.
You can select many color spaces as output for the scans.
You simply set the desired color space in the preferences dialog.
The Scans
Until recently I used the Epson 1640SU Photo flatbed scanner for scanning medium format slides. Needless to say, the Minolta is a great step foreward, and these two scanners are difficult to compare. But from what I've seen on the Internet, the Minolta performs very well compared to the other scanners in the same league.
Below you will find my own tests. Since I only have the Epson scans to compare with, I will make the test in a rather unconventional way. I can compare the scans to those from the Epson and I can show grain, which you can compare to scans you might have. This section might therefore be more a comparison of a flatbed scanner versus a film scanner than a real test of the Minolta. The software reproduces colors correctly on slides, but unfortunately not on (all) negatives.
Medium Format Slides
Scanning grain on Velvia is no problem. Below you'll see the Minolta compared to
the Epson 1640SU Photo, which does a pretty good job considering its low price.
However the Epson scan is of course noisy and has a much lower "real"
resolution. The examples here are from medium format slides scanned at 3200dpi.
The enlarged areas below are from this full-frame 6x6 Fuji Velvia transparency.
Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro at
3200dpi
Epson 1640SU Photo at 3200dpi
Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro at
3200dpi
Epson 1640SU Photo at 3200dpi
Both images have been brightened to reveal shadow details. Noise and
banding is visible in the Minolta scan, but the Epson scan is rather useless. It
might seem that this scanner is very noisy, but please remember that this is a
very dark Velvia slide and noise can always be reduced using multi-sampling
which this scanner also offers. This can be set in software to OFF, 2, 4, 8 or
16 samples. Below you'll see the same image with 16x multisampling.
Now noise is almost gone and more shadow details are visible. A bit of banding
can still be seen though (the image is still heavily brightened.
Another example below is grain in a Provia 100F sky.
35mm Slides
When scanning 35mm you get 4800dpi optical resolution — quite a lot (90MB in
8bit!), and I think you can see from the example below that just about all the
detail available on the film been has extracted from. Anyway, grain is very
visible.
Fuji Superia
These frames are Actual Pixel size, No enhancements or changes are made
after the scan, other than changing the color space from Adobe RGB to sRGB.
Negatives
Scanning negatives is not recommended with this software. Unfortunately the
Minolta software can not really reproduce correct colors from (some) negatives.
I have only tested Fuji Reala and Kodak Gold films. The Fuji films
where acceptable, but the colors on the Kodak negatives where way off. However,
it seems that the rather inexpensive VueScan software can be used for
scanning negatives. I will post a separate review of this problem and how to
solve it.
What Else?
The real resolution of the interpolated 4800 DPI on medium format has been
discussed a bit on the net. Minolta says that interpolation is done in the
"main scanning direction" — this sounds as though it might be a bit
better than actual interpolation. I will look at this in a later test. How about
B&W negatives? I've heard about problems, so I'll test this later also.
Conclusion
Minolta has created a scanner that delivers very high resolution scans and of
apparently professional quality. The price of this device is low enough for
enthusiastic amateurs to buy it. It's lighter and smaller than the obvious
competitors (Nikon 8000ED, Polaroid 120), and — at least in Europe — a bit
cheaper as well. Some even claims that the scans are better than the competitors
(some even think the scans are better than Imacon, but I doubt it), but there
are also some that says it's a bit inferior to the others. Bottom line is that
all of the scanners in this league are probably good, and this scanner is
definitely a revolution for enthusiastic amateur medium-format
photographers.
Links
To get a more complete view of what this scanner is capable of — and to get a
second opinion — you should follow some of the links below. You can also read
my article about medium format scanners here.
ï Imaging
Resource
ï Ken
Rockwell
ï SAPhoto
(Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro, Imacon Flextight Precision II, LeafScan 45)
ï SAPhoto
(Scanning negatives)
You could also simply go out and buy it. Here are some European sources.
ï CyberPhoto (SE)
ï Digital4U (DK)
ï DigitalFirst (UK)
Peter has published an addendum to his review in which he compares medium format scans at both 3200 and 4800 dpi. This article is located on Peter's own site.
Until recently I earned my living as a computer programmer, but have had a passion for photography for many years. When I saw how the digital world of computers were mixing with photography, I decided to devote more time on this passion. My primary interests are medium format, high quality scans and of course inkjet printers.
The
HS-P1 multi-format film holder for the Minolta
Dimage Multi is reviewed by David Mantripp
A discussion regarding this review
and issues pertaining to
its software can be found here.
