A couple of more observations:
1. Not sure if my grandfather's film is so brittle because it's so old, or it's was always like that, but yesterday the XA broke off the perforated part of the film. The scanner wouldn't eject the film after that, which meant I had to pull it out. That was the second time I had to do it and I keep wondering what it would do to the scanner. What it does to the film is clear - it seems like I really scan it well the first time instead of hoping I might rescan it at some point in the future...
2. I had read a XA review that stated that the problem with the scanner is that it makes medium format photos scanned on a flatbed scanner look bad. Well, I think I might have had a taste of it last night. I scanned some Portra and wow... Of course it could just be the contrast between Portra and the poor old Soviet film stock I was scanning before...
3. This bit is silly, just shows my lack of experience with SilverFast. When I started scanning Portra I was really disappointed by how grainy and low contrast it was turning out. Turns out it was just a prescan. Not sure what the wisdom in that was - some of the photos looked so bad I just wanted to give up scanning altogether. Then I opened those files in Photoshop, added some contrast (too much, it seems) and they just looked really nice. I know prescan is supposed to be quick, but if the photo looks terrible as a result, that seems like a disservice....
4. Finally - had some SilverFast problems. I installed it originally from a CD that came with the scanner. Then I decided to upgrade it to SE plus (thanks @timw4mail). And the thing wouldn't run after the upgrade. SilverFast support is not very helpful, by the way. Tried reinstalling it and didn't help. I finally downloaded another file from the SilverFast website and it worked.
Last edited by IgorZ; 01-11-2018 at 09:03 AM.
Reason: grammar mistakes :)