Minolta Scan Dual III Test
by
Luciano Napolitano

Minolta Scan Dual III is a dedicated film scanner for 35mm and APS slides and negatives (APS requires an optional adapter). In my opinion, it is a very capable and interesting unit, in particular because of the low price when compared to the quality. It isn't suitable for professional applications, but still excellent for private and home use. The installation was very easy, I've connected it to a very old PC (AMD K7-600Mhz, 256 megs of RAM, USB 1.1, Windows 98 SE) and configured everything in just five minutes without any problem.

I've started to scan very soon and wrote this short review one week later, comparing several slides with the same scanned by a Kodak photo lab and stored on Kodak Photo CD. As shown on the following samples, the quality of Minolta pictures is very close, and sometimes higher, than Kodak Photo CD for both resolution, colors and behaviours with shadows/highlights.

Pros:

1) Great value for the money

2) Easy to install and to use, worked fine even on my very outdated PC and it is also quite fast!

3) 16 bits per channel, excellent dynamic range, very sharp.

Cons:

1) Pictures require heavy post-processing editing in Adobe Photoshop or equivalent. The built-in dust removal, which is software-only, is quite weak and even the smallest, invisible grain of dust, will produce very big and very noticeable dots on the scanned picture. Scratches are even worst and require time and patience to correct all of them by hand. Slides scanned without any software correction activated in the driver, will be from *very* to *extremely* dark, anyway the very high DMAX of this unit makes possible to adjust the brightness and the saturation, without loosing any detail in both shadows and highlights. Activating the Auto Exposure didn't help me, as the color balance was still very far from the realty. This problem can be partially fixed by createing a set of image-correction jobs, one for each type of film or situation, and applying it automatically at the end of each scan. Negatives are much more brighter than slides and require less tweaking, but dust and scratches are more evident on this kind of film.

2) Pictures scanned from high speed films appear very grainy, probably much more than actually they are. I've tried with 200 ASA Agfa VISTA and they are still acceptable, 400 ASA Agfa Vista requires extra tweaking to get smoother pictures, Kodak 800 and Fuji 1600 produced totally useless pictures for either monitor and printer. Kodak kodachrome 64 and Kodak Elitechrome 100 was simply superb.

Test: I've scanned several slides and compred them with the same from a Kodak Photo CD. My LCD monitor is dark and quite contrasted, thence some corrected picture may appear too soft. Pictures was scanned at 2820DPI at 8 BITS instead of 16 (for Photoshop Elements compatibility, as *this* is the version supplied with the scanner) and resampled down for monitor/web use. Kodak Photo CD images acquired from CD at the resolution of 3072 and resampled down like before. I've also performed a color count on each picture and data can be summarized as follows:

Minolta corrected has 38,6% colors MORE than Minolta "as is".
PhotoCD corrected has 10.2% colors MORE more than PhotoCD "as is".
Minolta "as is" has 34,3% colors LESS than PhotoCD "as is".
Minolta corrected has 4,0% colors LESS than PhotoCD corrected.

KODAK ELITECHROME 100 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 39365	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 28433
Corrected Photo CD Number of colors: 39555	Corrected Minolta. Number of colors: 46127

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta

KODAK ELITECHROME 100 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 72043	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 42044
Corrected Photo CD Number of colors: 68275	Corrected Minolta. Number of colors: 70539

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta. The cactus' skin is much more defined than Photo CD.

KODAK ELITECHROME 100 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 36028	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 21688
Corrected Photo CD Number of colors: 34886	Corrected Minolta. Number of colors: 33196

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta

KODAK KODACHROME 64 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 34405	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 19357
Corrected Photo CD Number of colors: 40592	Corrected Minolta. Number of colors: 45749

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta. The color of the sky is more real on Minolta. The color of the rock is better on Photo CD. Details and sharpness is still slightly better on Minolta.

KODAK KODACHROME 64 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 43852	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 29216
Corrected Photo CD (the color of the sky and of the grass is quite different from the original slide). Number of colors: 71930	Corrected Minolta. Sky and grass color is *very* similar to the original projected slide. Number of colors: 61189

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta (seems to be slightly sharper)

KODAK KODACHROME 64 - CLICK ON A PICTURE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION.
Kodak Photo CD "as is" Number of colors: 95511	Scanned by Minolta without *any* correction. Number of colors: 70190
Corrected Photo CD Number of colors: 102541	Corrected Minolta. Number of colors: 95511

Particular, Photo CD	Particular, Minolta. On this nasty slide, with a lot of very bright and very dark areas all togheter, Minolta performed better, with greater sharpness and better color balance (especially for the sky) although Photo CD has an higher number of unique colors.

For any additional information, please contact me.

Thanks to Photo Digital System for supplying the Minolta unit.

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