I'm sold, but have I made and expensive mistake?

[RebBacchus]

I only made one actual scan on the demo software before I purchasesed Silverfast Ai.

My system is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ with 2Gb of 533Mz RAM. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder X800 XT video card and a 150Gb WD 10K RPM Raptor driver that has:
Average Latency 2.99 ms. Seek Times: Read 4.6 ms, write 5.2 ms

In short, not a state of the art gamer system but a good fast computer designed to work with my slides and convert them to DVDs.

What made me rush to buy the Silverfast were the video instructions and the "Lamp brightness" adjustment that seems to solve all my problems with my slides scanning too dark. My slides are correctly exposed for my Kodak slide projector and having the images dark and the color subdued has been driving me crazy.

What I didn't know was the time cost. If I use ICE or Silverfast's version I'm getting a 5 min+ scan time per slide! :o

Using Minolta's software scan time is between 25 seconds to 52 seconds. I can turn off the prescan and apply a batch correction. This lets me scan about 50 slides an hour. The TIFF file size is around 200Mb the JPEG is about 20Mb, which great. I'm using the ICC setting SMPTE-C to match the color to US TV's. But I want to archive the image and be ready for whatever the future provides in terms of format and densities and color schemes.

Granted, I'm trying to generate a large raw files but five minutes per slide makes this impossible for 6-8K slides I need to convert.

I was also disappointed in the Job function. My slide holder only holds four slides, which make this only marginally useful.

What I think I want is something where I can apply a series of settings and feed my slides using the 4th position one at a time.

I love your serial number choices of having the number in front of the name. It makes it easy to scan a tray of slides and keep them in sequence.

Please tell me how I can accomplish my task with Silverfast. I've loved everything I've seen... it just looks unusable for my task.

[LSI_Leschke]

Functions which slow down the scanner:

- clean image (grain reduction, for example on the 5400, but not found with the 5400-II model)- this function is active by default in Silverfast
- digital ICE
- multi sampling

If you set these to the identical setings you are using with the Minolta- software, the scan times should be about the same. Please also keep in mind that the lamp adjustment on most scanners does not actually make the lamp brighter, but increases the exposure time, which again slows down the scan.