LaserSoft Imaging

I have SF SE 6 for my 4870 on Win XP and Photoshop CS. Whenever I activate Digital ICE in SF the scan takes forever (5 min. or so).

SF does some scans labelled "ICE" which take for minutes. The last scan (RGB) then goes quite quick.

A Digital ICE-scan in Epson Scan works very fast. There is no noticeable difference to a scan without ICE.

What's up with that? I have ordered the Upgrade to SF Ai 6. Will it be just the same?

Maybe I was wrong. Epson Scan also takes its time. But it hides this cleverly in a message saying the scanner is warming up. This message takes 6 min. if ICE is on and 2 min. if it's off.

I am really wondering. I once had a Nikon Coolscan IV and scans were not SO much slower with ICE on. 6 min. for every frame (for 35 mm slides @ 2400 dpi), that's HUGE!.
I just imagine how long batch scanning of 4 film strips with 6 frames each will take ...

Can/will this ever be improved, or do we have to live with it and trade dust-free scans for everlasting scan times?

Dear TG,

I fear there's nothing we can improve regarding the speed of a scan with ICE activated.
The Nikon CoolScan film scanners can do the infrared scan together with the RGB scan in one path, the Epson flatbed scanner has to do the RGB scan and a seperate infrared scan, which both need some time to wait for lamp warmup, as the light source has to be switched between the two scans (at least for transparency scans).

Regards
Ralf

In addition the head ahs to move up to 11 inches versus a little over and inch

Frank