I tried it for a magazine scanner, powerslide X or something a year ago. I couldn't get the exposure right. With single exposure, you got strong halo effects on

I tried it for a magazine scanner, powerslide X or something a year ago. I couldn't get the exposure right. With single exposure, you got strong halo effects on rather dark images that had small, bright spots (reflections on small objects, eyes). So I tried multi-exposure which is also recommended with the official software for the scanner. But it seemed to mis-calculate something here. According to the scanner's manual, in this mode, the scanner takes three samples at different exposure times. I don't know what vuescan did wrong here, but on brighter images the scanner made "weird noises" and I got weird stripes in the final image. Darker photos worked just fine. The irony here is that despite vuescan being really customizable, totally overwhelming the first time you switch to advanced mode, there didn't seem to be a way to manually adjust the three individual exposure times, which I would totally have expected. Just a single slider. I was suspecting it would help to mitigate the issue in some way. That said, while this was mostly an issue with that specific scanner (no idea if they even have all the scanners at hand to test them, seems rather unlikely that they have a warehouse full of 6500 scanners ready to scan), in general the software was awesome. My plan was scanning about 10k slides and have it save the original scan without any further processing as a 16bpc tif, then autocrop, color correct and save as jpeg. Easily done with vuescan. Where I couldn't figure out things on my own, documentation helped out. Compare that to "Silverfast AI". Just to get a download of the trial version they wanted an email address. Strike one. Then the UI, it was just oversimplified and make to look cool, using its own theming entirely. To add insult to injury, it seems this was a rather recent overhaul, and many of the howtos on the web referred to a completely different gui layout. Strike two. And even after fiddling with the gui for a while, I failed to get a baseline setup that would just scan the image, use infrared dust removal, autocrop and nothing else. For some reason, there was always still some color boosting and sharpening going on, driving me crazy. Strike three. It also crashed twice, which is probably due to shitty drivers - the software that came with the device crashed too.[1] Uninstalled after this experience. But obviously, to get another strike, they kept spamming me with "hey wanna buy our crap" until I just deleted the mail alias I used for them. [1] Another bonus point for vuescan - it spawns a separate process for communicating with the scanner, completely eliminating that source for crashes.