23. January 2002
Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro - Review

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.

This article is a review of the Multi Pro scanner.
It contains quite many pictures and loading can therefore be rather slow. Please have patience.

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 bit for each color as output. Other scanners can do this also, but the Minolta is scanning with 16 bit internally also, whereas the competitors (Nikon, Polaroid and Imacon) are scanning with 14 bit.
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) 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 to 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 in some hard plastic. You don't get the feeling that you can brake 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 in a 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, although I think you can by a "Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro SET" that includes both cards, so I had to buy a SCSI controller card. The web site of Minolta suggest 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 could make 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 any details with 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 has proved good 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 film 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 it's 120 film. You can then crop and re-focus the pre-scan if needed. Focus can be set manually or 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
So far I have used the Epson 1640SU Photo flatbed scanner for scanning medium format slides. Needless to say, that the Minolta is a great step ahead and that they 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.
Here 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 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 Minolta compared to the Epson 1640SU Photo, which does a pretty good job the low price considered. 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 entire image (6x6 Fuji Velvia, can be seen bigger here) from which the marked areas are enlarged on the scans below:


Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro and Epson 1640SU Photo both at 3200dpi.


Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro and Epson 1640SU Photo both at 3200dpi. Both images are brightened up to reveal shadow details. Noise and banding is visible in the Minolta scan, but the Epson scan is rather useless.
It might seem that 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 (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 bee seen though (the image is still heavily brightened up).

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 se from the example below, that most, if not all details are extracted from the slides. Anyway, grain is very visible.


Fuji Superia



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 out.
However, it seems that the rather inexpensive VueScan 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 scan in a very high and - I assume - 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, all of the scanners in this league are probably good, and this scanner is definitely a revolution for enthusiastic amateur medium format photographers.

Update
I've also written the following in-depth articles:
• Scanner profiling on a budget 1/2 - [NEW]
• Scanner profiling on a budget 2/2 - [NEW]
• What resolution do I need?
• Scanning negatives on the Multi Pro
• 4800dpi on 120 film
• Medium format vs. 35mm vs. Digital

Links
I will try to answer any question I get or find about this scanner on a separate page located here.

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.

• Imaging Resource
• Ken Rockwell
• SAPhoto (Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro, Imacon Flextight Precision II, LeafScan 45)
• SAPhoto (Scanning negatives)

[Update 18.03.05] : • EPSON 3200 vs. EPSON 4870 (vs. CANON 9900F) - a very interesting comparison of two flatbed scanners and the Nikon 8000ED film scanner.

[Update 26.06.02]
A group of Minolta Pro users are quite concerned about the problems with scanning negatives. They have made a site describing the problems:
• http://www.visicon.se/multipro/

You could also simply buy it.

• CyberPhoto (SE)
• Digital4U (DK)
• DigitalFirst (UK)