After drying dimage (in a VM on Windows XP 32 bit), Silverfast 6 (in a VM on Windows XP 32 bit), Silverfast 8 (good in modern OS) or Vuesca (good in modern OS)…
… I discovered that - for my Scanelite Mark1 at least - the only programs managing to get a good scan are dimage and Silverfast6.
Silverfast8 doesn’t use Digital Ice, but their own IR-assisted iSRD. And it creates artifacts (never had issues with my previous scanner with it). Maybe my IR channel is different to what Silverfast expects, but I get weird lineskips and blotches, areas where the iSRD goes nuts while nothing was there. And no, I’m not scanning silver-based negs or Kodachrome.
Silverfas6 doesn’t has this issue.
Vuescan has issues with the autofocus. If you pick a spot to autofocus, it does it’s thing, but way faster than way Dimage and Silverfast are able to do.
I think it does something wrong in this, because when I tweak - painfully by trail and error - the focus number in Vuefast I manage to get it just as sharp as Dimage and Silverfast… but Vuescan’s autofocus just doesn’t pinpoint that number (while the other two work fine!!).
So, Dimage ‘scan as positive’ (and I tweak the R, G and B gain to let the filmstrip of C41 be aligned and quite high, but quite some safe margin to clipping). For positive (slides) I just scan with the gain equal and at 1.0. I have a Fuji it8 target that seems to fill that range, so I can color-calibrate it to that.
Only drawback of Dimage is that it doesn’t do ‘batch’ scanning.
In Silverfast6 - if you get around all the bugs and quirks of the very old software - you can queue up an entire filmholder and press start and go away. But - officially - it is not available anymore.
The 16bit linear tiff files from a ‘scan as positive’, I even managed to through in Vuescan and then ‘scan raw from file’. Through this trick you can scan ‘from raw to raw’. If you set your output raw as DNG, you can create neatly Vuescan-created DNG files. Through exiftool you might have to fix ‘camera maker / camera model’ for NegativeLabPro to pick up the correct profiles, but I managed to get this working, and the results were OK.
Don’t use NLP anymore, so I don’t the converting from .tif to .dng handy from head. But I still scan with Silverfast6 and my Dimage5400 :).
(I did some tests with my Sony A7m2 with Sony 50mm 2.8 macro lens with NLP vs the same negs with my Dimage 5400 converted through NLP… the Minolta won hands down (in the colors, the resolution the film is oten the limiting factor), since then I never tried to DSLR-scan again).