"Sigma SD1 Merrill not good for scanning negatives/slides"

DrTebi wrote:

Are you stitching 35mm? I couldn't see any improvement over single images with the sdQH. Medium format film is a different matter and certainly needs stitching to get crisp grain on silver negs.

I have tried some stitching of 35mm with the Pentax K-1, but couldn't really see any improvement. This may have been due to the fact that I had to use extension tubes, and mine don't have electronic contacts—hence I had to focus manually, which is difficult even with the live view.

I still need to try some 35mm stitching with the Sigma SD-1M.

By the way, the "Pixel Shift" feature of the Pentax K-1 can also come in handy for scanning negatives or slides. I could definitely observe more detail in a single-shot medium format slide, but it also introduced some weird artifacts, which I could not see in the same image when stitching.

By the way, what strategy have you used for converting negatives to positives? Normally "ColorPerfect" gives me some quite acceptable results, but for some reason it does not with images from the SD-1.

I loaded a few hundred B&W negs (DNG files) at a time into Adobe Camera Raw, selected all, and inverted them with the Curves tool.

I have only a handful of colour negs, none of much importance, so I did them on an Epson V750 scanner, in order to use the conversion software provided. However, I have also done it "by hand" using the Photoshop Curves tool -- "Auto" in this fixes the orange cast and gets you somewhere near the right colours.

I wouldn't use the scanner for important images, at least not 35mm.