On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 11:14:46 +0100, Peter
wrote:

In the meantime, I posted a fresh scan of a pic here

www.peter2000.co.uk/images/sign-auto-exp.jpg

whose 35mm original I know will be as sharp as I can do with Provia
100 in the OM4 camera, and with no camera shake.

This was scanned on the FS2710, with and without auto colour
correction (can't see any difference), direct into Photoshop in 36-bit
mode, had the 2710 colour profile applied to it (not sure why this
absolutely necessary step isn't automatic...) and saved as a high
quality (#9 quality) 24-bit jpeg.

Do you think this is of reasonable quality?

Looks fine, though the white roof of the building looks a little
bleached out, does the projected slide look any better?

I realise that I have no independent way of checking the colours
because I cannot get away from the colour profiles of my screen (19"
CTX LCD) or my printer (Canon i850).

I wouldn't worry too much about colour, as long as the all the
information in the image is scanned the colour can be altered later.

For some reason, perhaps from getting a load of slides scanned a few
years ago onto a photo-cd (back in the days when Kodak thought the
photo-cd was going to change the world) I think the resolution alone
ought to be lot better than this.

Even looking at resolution alone, my scanned slides seem to be no
sharper than 4MP digital camera images. Scanning a 35mm slide at
2700dpi should yield a lot more pixels...

All the dust and hairs look well focused Seriously though, if there
is something in the image that is 1 pixel wide, it will only be
scanned perfectly if it lines up exactly with the pixels in the
scanner.

So ideally you want the scanning resolution to be somewhat higher than
the maximum resolution of the slide. A good way to check the focussing
of the scanner would be to scan a slide of a line pair chart, look at
where the lines match the pixels of the scanner and see how tight the
focussing is in these places compared to a projected image.

cheers,
Pete.