23. January 2002
Minolta Dimage Scan Multi Pro - More information

Well, the newly published review does not answer all questions people have - not a surprise, since there are so many questions to be asked about film scanners....
I'm therefore making this page, which should gather more questions and answers about the Multi Pro scanner.

If you have any questions, examples or answers please feel free to mail me.

Let's jump right into it:

Does the Multi pro make horizontal lines in the scans?
Visible when brightening the image using eg. levels in Photoshop.

I don't see it!
I've made a crop from this image:

and saved it in tiff PC byte order LZW compression. The color space is sRGB. It's a simple scan - no multi sampling, no ICE and no other corrections made. The film is Fuji Provia 100F, by the way.
What I can see when I brighten the image up, are some flare below highlight areas:


You can download the file from here and try to brighten it yourself. I'm sorry that it is rather big (6MB) but that's just the nature of these scans...


Blocking of red areas
or red posterization...

In areas with red - pink or dark red - it seems that the scanner is "blocking" the area. Or in other words, making totally homogeneous areas with the same color, perhaps only red.
Some people have noticed this and I have an example of it here:
Again, I use the example file from above (this one), and brighten it up to the extreme - I make an Adjustment Layer in Photoshop with Levels and move the midtone slider all the way to the left, then this is what you see on the red line in the background:


Take a copy of the Adjustment Layer with Levels to make the effect even more extreme. All you see now is the red area:



I have no explanation for this. And why is it only red?
Can anyone help?


[Update]
The problem seems to be related to the Color Space, not the scanner itself.
The image above is exported from the scanner in the AdobeRGB color space. This is clipping information in the red area, in other words, the slide itself contains a wider range of (red) colors than the AdobeRGB space can represent. I guess it is even worse with the sRGB color space.
I changed the output from the scanner to "Wide Range RGB" and this was what I got:


No red blocking anymore. So if the red blocking becomes a problem, you might simply have to change the color space you are working in.

Fuji "pepper grain"?
It seems that some Fuji films has a flaw in the emulsion that shows up as small "pepper grains".
It has been discussed if this has anything to do with the Multi Pro scanner - I don't think so, since photographers using other scanners have seen the same phenomena.
I don't know on what kind of film stock it occurs. Some say it's only Provia. Some say it's only on 120 film. I don't know, but I think I see this problem on both some of my Provia 100F films and on some of my Velvia films.
See for yourself:

Fuji Provia 100F enlarged to 200% in Photoshop. No ICE. Scanned on Multi Pro @ 3200dpi.

The bigger black spots on the "farm picture" is simply dust, but the numerous smaller spots aren't.


Fuji Velvia 100%. No ICE. Scanned on Multi Pro @ 3200 dpi.

Here I didn't bother to enlarge, since the spots are easily seen. Is this normal film-grain?
[Update] 26. March 2002.
Photographer Nick Rains, has an explanation for the "Pepper Grain" problem. It's the film-base it seems - read more here.