Kodak RFS 3600+SF focus

[dave66]

Having recently aquired Silverfast for my Kodak scanner, I have been making some test scans compairing the orginal kodak software and SF. I have found SF to produce wonderful color scans from my negatives: a great improvement from the orginal software, but....

I have also found that the SF scans are softer than the Kodak scans. I have tried auto focus, manual point focus, but I never seem to be able to get as crisp a scan with SF.

Any thoughts or tricks would be appreciated.

[Bill Wood]

Dave

You might need a RFS 3600 Firmware update. In earlier versions Kodak assumed that film strips would not need focusing because of the design of the film handling device. Later they updated the scanner firmware to include autofocusing both film and slides.

Check the firmware version number by clicking on the "i" button on the lower right edge of the Kodak software interface. Silverfast Ai 5.5 does not display the scanner firmware number. You should have version 1.3 or later. Version 1.3 implemented the film strip autofocus fix. Go to: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/ ... 3600.shtml to get the latest firmware.

If you have Firmware 1.3 or later installed you might be seeing different sharpening between the Kodak version 1.X software and the Silverfast "sharpening" methods. Kodak uses a more-or-less standard sharpening algorithm and gives you a choice of none, low, medium and high sharpening. Silverfast Ai 5.5 Or13 provided the more powerful "Unsharp Masking" form of Sharpening.

That takes a little more understanding of how to use it. Check paragraph 4.9 on page 8 of the Silverfast Quick-start PDF file or the more detailed discussion starting on page 146 of the newly issued Silverfast 272 page Ai 5.5 E Manual here: http://www.lasersoft-imaging.com/downlo ... Ai55_E.pdf

Bill