# [long] Overall usage impressions

Paul D. Robertson (proberts@clark.net)
Mon, 25 May 1998 14:19:07 -0400 (EDT)

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I promised to follow-up after getting my act together, so here it is:

I initially had serious problems getting GTK installed, due to the
placement of the default RedHat installation's libraries versus my
upgrades. It wasn't as much trouble as the problmes I had with GTK on
a FreeBSD box, so I decided to upgrade GTK on the RedHat box, rather
than FreeBSD on the other machine.

Oliver Rauch convinced me that I needed xscanimage, so I bit the
bullet and got the GTK stuff straightened out for that, which included
upgrading a lot of software on the box my scanner is connected to.

Once I got SANE working with X, things went pretty smoothly. I also upgraded
my copy of The GIMP, and made SANE do the cool Photoshop-like scanner
thing with xscanimage (and it works better than the Mustek/Photoshop
combo on a Mac at work).

When I scanned prints in that mode, things were wonderful. Many kudos to
the whole SANE team, and Oliver in particular for the Astra code. My
next try was to scan some 6cm x 6cm slides, and the gamma on them was
very bad. I then sent off for the transparancy adapter, hoping this
would clear up my problems. It was a significant money investment,
considering the price of the scanner, but overall the cost of both the
scanner and adapter were well under what I would have paid when I
originally looked at scanners for the scanner alone, and still less than
the equiv. HP combo with xvscan.

Also, since I'm not starting to shoot both 6x6 and 6x4.5, I'm not willing
to pay the price for a negative scanner in those formats, which like
slide projectors for them, are generally priced a great deal higher than
the 35mm equivalent.

Now, I have to admit up-front that I'm not one to read the manual
carefully, especially in the case of GUIs. So, when my transparancy adapter
still showed dark images, I tried to adjust the gamma with the pencil-like
tool that is the default interface. This produced some very interesting, but
unwanted results. Oliver once again stepped to my rescue and explained the
true gamma correction method for xscanimage, and after pressing the gamma
button and entering a value, things got much, much better.

I'm now happily scanning medium format transparencies on my 1200s (Velvia
and Astia if it makes a difference, though the Velvia needs some color
balance correction to look like Velvia, it scans well, my 35mm slides are
the new E200, and I can't wait for it in 120). The gamma value I tend to use
is between 1.6 and 1.8. I am also happily scanning 35mm transparencies, which
I wasn't sure would work.

Preview mode doesn't seem to work well for me, so I scan at 300dpi x
300dpi, normally the full bed with several slides on it using xscanimage
from within The Gimp, then cropping, and pasting each image into a
working window. I've rarely had to increase the image brightness or
colors within the Gimp, mostly it's just a way for me to crop and save as
JPEG.

The transparency lamp does seem to shut itself off, so perhaps my problem
with that was from my trials with upgrading and hanging up things.

Bad bits:

Preview mode shows weird stuff, not a preview. Selecting "Preview Patch"
makes things die.

35mm slides don't always scan well, mostly I'm sure due to the size of
the image, and the scanner itself. Not a SANE problem at all, and I've a
good number of them that have scanned wonderfully.

When SANE is busy scanning, hitting cancel tends to hang things pretty
badly, so I've learned not to cancel a scan in progress.

The GIMP wants to put all of its busy work in ~/.gimp, not /tmp, in a
per-pid file, which is maddening, since I have a lot of space in /tmp,
but I don't want to symlink the entire .gimp directory there.

Summary:

Sane works well. There are some rough edges, but overall I've been very happy
with the package. My thanks to everyone who's put so much effort into
such a fine piece of work. The Umax Astra code is great! Oliver's support
and code are both first-rate. The GIMP is a fantastic piece of work. The
combination of them all is phenonimal.

The Umax transparency adapter functions very well. At this point, I'd
recommend it to anyone wishing to scan slides in, though I'm sure that now I
know how to do gamma correction, I'd try an inverted lightbox on the scanner
bed first, since those tend to come in at ~$35 with the good lights, and
anyone working with a lot of slides won't mind having a small one about if it
doesn't work out. If you're considering the adapter, and you only have
35mm slides, I'd recommend getting it from some place that will take a
return if you don't like the results. I didn't check their return policy,
but I got mine from Microwarehouse/Macwarehose with an on-line purchase.

Paul
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Robertson "My statements in this message are personal opinions
proberts@clark.net which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
PSB#9280

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