LaserSoft Imaging

I too experience soft banding issues using a Microtek 120tf scanner and Silverfast Ai v6.4.2 r9 on Mac OS X 4.2

Tonight I started a 6x6 scan. The previous scan was a 6x7. I hit Option+Delete (on Mac OS X) to clear out the previous scan and previews. I then selected 6x6 for film size. I forgot to select the multi-sampling so I scanned at 1x multi-sampling. The resulting scan had soft-banding throughout.

So I ejected the glass carrier, then I hit Option+Delete again, double checked all settings. Settings included 6x6, Transparency, Negative, Autofocus on, 4x MultiSampling (cant get it to go better than 4x!), 16 Bit Grey, No filter, Image type standard, 4000dpi, Q-factor 1.5, Illford XP2 film type in Negafix.

The resulting scan was WITHOUT soft banding. Yeah!

What I've found to help is that before every scan I will Option-Delete (on Mac) and clear the previous previews. This also resets the selection in the prescan window. More often than not this will clear up the soft banding issue, but not always.

I have speakers on my desk and they are within one foot of the scanner. I have also discovered that if I have music playing through the speakers my scans come out with soft banding - I know it sounds strange - but if I turn off the speakers the scans GENERALLY come out band-free.

One tip is to check your scans at 100% in photoshop as soon as the scan is complete. That way you do not have to go through the time consuming dusting and prescanning of negatives.

I'd still like to see this soft banding issue resolved as I would like to use Silverfast with 100% confidence. I have never seen this issue using the same scanner with v**s**n or Scan Wizard Pro TX (through, truth be known, both of those products pale in functions compared to Silverfast).

Thanks for the response.

Brett Kosmider
Minneapolis, MN, USA

I have speakers on my desk and they are within one foot of the scanner. I have also discovered that if I have music playing through the speakers my scans come out with soft banding - I know it sounds strange - but if I turn off the speakers the scans GENERALLY come out band-free.

Dear Brett

thanks for your valuable comment. Indeed this doesn't sound that strange to me as you might have thought. Magnetic fields influencing CCDs aren't that unhead of. I assumed though the scanner and the speakers would be sufficiently shielded, but it turns out that this is perhaps not necessarily the case.

We had a couple of threads with soft banding issue in this form before, and while the 1.33 firmware in the Polaroid Sprintscan 120 could be identified as troublesome, neither LaserSoft testing personnel nor Microtek technicians were able to reproduce the demonstrated phenomen with the Artixscan 120 series.
However, we don't have speakers in our offices...?!

Best regards
Sonny Noack
- Manager Technical Support, LaserSoft Imaging AG -