Dave said:
Was all ready to purchase the Coolscan V but now I'm having second
thoughts, since is does not seem to support multisampling. How
valuable is this capability when scanning contrasty Velvia slides?
It probably wouldn't make any difference at all to contrasty slides, but
it does show advantages with low contrast slides and also with negatives
on the LS-4000 (which is the equivalent performance of the LS-50 from
the previous generation).
A lot of reviews of the LS-4000 suggested that the multiscanning benefit
was barely noticeable (presumably why Nikon dropped it when downscaling
the design to the LS-50) but these assessments were all done using good
slides, and looking for the advantage in the shadows, which is not where
the improvements actually appear on this scanner. Even so, you can
implement multiscanning on scanners which do not inherently support it
suing some 3rd party software, such as Vuescan. So if it only something
that you expect to use occasionally you would probably be quite happy
going ahead with the LS-50.
Would the multisampling capability of the Minolta 5400 or Coolscan
5000 produce better scans in difficult high contrast slides?
Multiscanning does carry a significant scan time penalty and it can take
well over half an hour to scan a full resolution frame at 16x on the
LS-4000, depending on the other options used. The LS-5000 is twice as
fast as the LS-4000, so this shouldn't be quite as objectionable, but
the Minolta is already slower than the LS-4000 at the best of times,
especially with the grain dissolver active, so I wouldn't consider that
to be an option if you think your time is valuable and expect to need
this facility a lot.
