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A flatbed scanner cannot scan slides and negatives as well as a scanner designed for slide and negative scanning.
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technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
D r . G i z m o
Silverfast software and the PrimeFilm scanner; JPEG photos shown on a DVD player
Oct. 22, 2003
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard
When your buddy first wrote about PrimeFilm 1800 slide and negative scanner, I bought it and have since recommended it to many friends. We all have been highly satisfied. However, another friend to whom I recently made the recommendation discovered the Epson Perfection 3170 PHOTO Scanner, which she argued that the scanner 's 3200 dots-per-inch rating would give a better scan.
The SilverFast scanner software your pal recommended in that review now costs more than $100. That 's more than the PrimeFilm scanner costs. Could Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 be just as good? It comes with the Epson scanner.
The Epson also uses 48-bit scanning. Can you explain this? Is it better? -- Betty S., via cox.net
The doctor loves Photoshop Elements 2.0 and so does his workmate. It 's outstanding software for photo editing. But it is not a scanner driver. It works with scanners through a so-called TWAIN interface on Windows PCs and Mac OS X computers, but it does not work as a scanner driver.
So the scanner driver the doctor recommends is the same as his buddy 's choice from a few years ago. It 's the ÒliteÓ (or SE) version of SilverFast, from www.silverfast.com/. The PrimeFilm scanner isn 't a professional device, but the SilverFast scanner driver is as close to professional as consumers can get.
The doctor can't recommend the Epson scanner since he hasn't tried it. It's a flatbed scanner that also does slides and negatives, and that sort of scanner cannot ever be as good as a scanner dedicated to slides and negatives. The doctor and his pal have said this many times. A flatbed scanner cannot scan slides and negatives as well as a scanner designed for slide and negative scanning.
I happened to come across your partner 's article about using your DVD player to show JPEG images on your television. I've been experimenting with that same project for about a month, now. The main problem I have is the loss of quality. Let me explain.
DVDs themselves are awesome and we enjoy watching movies on our big screen TV, but I'm disappointed with the quality of the JPEGs on my system.
They are not clear at all. Even though they are on a high-resolution CD, they show poorly. One DVD player I tried was even worse than the first one. -- R.J.P., via cox.net
The doc has seen the same problem. Some DVD players won 't show JPEG images, some show them badly and a few show them reasonably well. But no DVD player shows them at high resolution, the way they are shown on a computer screen.
DVD players that show still images translate, or interpolate, the image from down to a maximum of 720 pixels by 480 pixels. If your images are that size already, the circuitry in the player won 't have to resize them.
To get the rest results, resize your images before putting them onto a disk to show on your TV. Use good software, and try various mathods (the doc likes the Lanczos method in older versions of ACDSee and the excellent Windows editor, Photo-Brush. Graphic Converter does a good job on all versions of the Mac.
Dr. Gizmo resizes photos on Al Fasoldt's Apple G4 computer. You can send a G5, an iPod or just a note to the doctor or his pal at Technology, Box 4915, Syracuse, NY 13221. Or send e-mail to afasoldt@twcny.rr.com.
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