Product Reviews

Konica Minolta's DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 II is a high-quality 35mm film scanner with a maximum 5400dpi optical resolution. It's aimed at enthusiasts and semi-professional photographers, but would equally serve a small studio, as it boasts features more often seen on professional scanners, including automated hardware and software correction from Kodak's Digital ICE4 suite.

Overall, the specification is impressive: the image sensor is a three-line primary-colour CCD with 5340 pixels per line producing a maximum 5102 x 7653 pixels from a scanning area of 24 x 36mm, which is enough to print to A2 at 300ppi. It also boasts 16-bit colour output and a wide dynamic range of 4.8Dmax. What really stands out, though, is its ease of use, which means users with little previous experience can make quality scans from their first attempt.

Setting up the device under Mac OS X was completely trouble-free, although, sadly, Konika Minolta has dropped FireWire in favour of USB 2.

Like its predecessor, this scanner sports more external controls than most, with a manual focus dial, and quick-scan and eject buttons located on the front panel. It also features a fully customisable batch-scanning facility, although there's no optional slide-feeder or roll-film adaptor available to make full use of it.

The device includes two well-designed film holders - one for filmstrips of up to six-frames and another for up to four mounted slides, from 1mm up to 3.2mm thick. It won't take glass-mounted slides, but it receives the older cardboard frames. A nice touch is the open end to the holder, allowing you to remove and replace the last mounted slide.

The bundled Easy Scan

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application takes you step by step through the scanning process. Although a number of automated image-processing options are offered (Digital ICE4, Pixel Polish and Grain Dissolver, as well as an option to match the scan to its intended use), inquisitive novices will soon be attracted to the fully-featured utility, which is still simple to use. Naturally, the all-important Digital ICE4 image correction tools are included, alongside more advanced tools such as tone curves and histograms with white, grey and black-point adjustment; selective colour correction; as well as hue, saturation and lightness controls.

There are also limited tools for users who want to have some control over the image processing. One worth finding is the useful Variation Palette. This enables you to compare corrected sample images for colour balance, brightness and contrast, or saturation.

The DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 II offers a wide range of advanced scanning options such as manual focusing for curled film; manual exposure control, which is useful for bracketed sequences; multi-sampling to reduce random noise; and support for output colour space and monitor ICC profiles. We particularly like the extensive job-file list, a series of more than 60 scanning presets matched to the intended use of the image. This reduces unnecessary file sizes and scanning times. Scan settings can also be set manually.

Image quality was impressive, with plenty of detail, excellent tonal range and remarkable colour fidelity. Using DiMAGE Scan, index scans were performed briskly: four slides took just 45 seconds. With so many options available, pre-scan times varied, although we managed 30 seconds with autofocus. A one-minute 48-second scan at full resolution produced a 105MB 8-bit Tiff file, although the same scan took less than five minutes when it was performed using Digital ICE's dust and scratch removal.

While the DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 II has an impressive maximum resolution, few users are likely to need it, especially if they will be saving the files as Tiffs with the resultant large file sizes and longer scan times. Given the quality of output, range of useful features and ease of use, the Konica Minolta Scan Elite 5400 II is good value for money and a great choice.