[photo-3d] Re: Scanning slides

[Vincent Chan <v7chan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I too have the X6 and lightlid for the last year.  Works great, especially
considering the price. For pictures for the web, stereo cards, or small
pictures in documents, it more than meets my needs.  I believe that the
lightlid will work with a number of microtek's other scanners, for those of
you who have an older scanner (I also had an older microtek V300 scanner).
The real trick to the great colours, is that the scanner turns off the
scanning light, and illuminates the slides from behind. 

However, it is a flatbed scanner.  It's resolution is only 600x1200 dpi.
That means that the sensor is 600dpi across its width, and that the motor
moves the sensor really slowly down the page to "get" a 1200dpi resolution.
 So really, if you scan something in at 1200dpi, it has to interpolate
(fancy word for guessing what the pixel values are in the empty spaces
where there is no data) in the other direction.  Thus, the real resolution
of the scanner is 600x600 dpi.  I don't know why they advertise 9600dpi
interpolated, as you can interpolate any resolution that you want!

What does this mean?  If you scan across a 35mm slide, the most you get is
about 900 pixels by 600 pixels of real data.  More than enough resolution
for a web page, good enough (depending on how picky you are) to make small
pictures for a stereo card (your printing software will interpolate pixels
between the real data, giving a smooth but slightly blurry picture), but
you're not going to get 8x10 glossy's.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy with my X6, but I hope no one buys one
and expects to make poster sized prints, especially after all the glowing
reviews given here.

Too poor to buy a film scanner,

						Vincent.




Dan Shelley wrote:
> 
> I disagree because I think I found a GREAT solution - The Microtek 
> ScanMaker X6 scanner with the extra LightLid does a great job.