[HN Gopher] I Almost Bought a Scanner
___________________________________________________________________
I Almost Bought a Scanner
Author : leejo
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-01-25 22:00 UTC (59 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (leejo.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (leejo.github.io)
| lytfyre wrote:
| The state of dedicated film scanning is so bad these days,
| especially for larger than 35mm formats that it seems most people
| still shooting film are resorting to using a digital camera and a
| macro lens with something to hold the film.
|
| Seems a pity.
| aplusbi wrote:
| A friend of mine built a device specifically for using a
| digital camera to "scan" 35mm film:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDWeAbd6J4
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think there are adapters for digicams.
| fetus8 wrote:
| You're correct. Most people who do their own scans either use a
| macro lens or a telephoto with extension tubes to create a
| macro lens of sorts. Then you need a negative holder such as
| this one: https://www.negative.supply/shop-all/basic-film-
| carrier-35. You need a light table or LED hot light, and a way
| to hold the camera and you're in business.
|
| Personally, I've been scanning my own 35mm negatives for the
| past few years with both a Full-frame DSLR and an APS-C
| Mirrorless camera, and get much much better results than I'd
| been getting via my local film processing lab and their
| scanning.
|
| Scanning negatives with a modern digital camera still retains a
| lot of the filmic quality that we've come to expect via
| shooting film. Obviously you lose the "resolution" and ability
| to blow those images up once scanned, but you can 100% still
| see the grain, color reproduction, and analog anomalies that
| we're used to by shooting film.
| keithbingman wrote:
| Yeah, I have recently switched to "scanning" my 6x6cm and
| 35mm negatives with a macro lens and digital camera. It's
| probably not as flat out perfect as a really good scanner,
| but the end results look amazing and fit my workflow for
| digital images as well.
|
| I recently got a camera with "pixel shift" technology and
| using that the files have 96mb and really show off the grain.
| Plus it's just faster than scanning ever was. I am really
| very happy with the setup.
| fetus8 wrote:
| Heck ya! How are you processing your negatives? Negative
| Lab Pro? Manually creating positives in Photoshop?
| jrockway wrote:
| I wet scan on a flatbed, though I will admit the process is
| tedious and holding a negative up to a lamp and taking a
| snapshot with my phone is 80% as good ;)
| pathartl wrote:
| Hey! I took a dive into the FlexTight scanners late last year and
| actually got my FlexTight Precision II to work on 64-bit Windows
| 11: https://pathar.tl/resources/flextight
| https://pathar.tl/resources/flexcolor
|
| Through various driver discs and archived files online I was able
| to compile some resources and threw them up on Archive.org
| (available on the FlexColor page of my site).
|
| Let me know if you have any questions!
| jojobas wrote:
| That's odd. A sub $1000 Epson scanner with 35mm and 120 film
| adapters can resolve professional film grain, can't do better
| then that.
| whitemary wrote:
| The epson consumer scanners are good. Really good. But they are
| nothing like drum scanners and other professional scanners.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| You can do quite a bit better than Epson flatbed scanners.
| t3estabc wrote:
| [dead]
| stavros wrote:
| > A Hasselblad Flextight X1. Google the thing for the price if
| you're curious, and no I wasn't going to pay that much, I was
| going to pay less than half of that (a bargain to be fair).
|
| I hate the author.
|
| EDIT: I found a price, it's $10k.
| glxxyz wrote:
| Nearer the end they add that they were "not prepared to drop
| 5,000 Euros on it"
| stavros wrote:
| Ah, I just saw it, thanks.
| aendruk wrote:
| Even for consumer scanners, it seems I'm helping my parents fight
| unmaintained proprietary firmware on Windows every few years.
| Eventually I just set them up with SANE.
| jandrese wrote:
| Sadly it seems SANE has no Hasselblad drivers at all, which
| probably makes sense given that these are professional devices
| with a very small install base. Even worse, given the high end
| features I suspect the firmware isn't just a clone of some
| other device like it is so often with scanners.
|
| Probably not too hard to reverse engineer with some skills and
| tools, but well beyond what a random photographer is likely to
| be able to do. The real shame is the company squatting on the
| driver source code and refusing to update it. It is supremely
| frustrating when companies treat the driver software--useless
| without the hardware for it to run--as top company secrets. The
| software does nothing without the hardware your company sells,
| so who cares if someone could "steal" it?
| StillBored wrote:
| Again, I will write. The job of an OS is to provide an abstracted
| shim between HW customers have, and the software they have. When
| this doesn't happen it is a giant fail. There are untold
| thousands of devices just like this scanner for which the choices
| to drop support (or change) the OS driver ABI puts people in a
| bad position because frequently this low volume specialty
| hardware costs more than the OS vendors product and a new PC/etc
| to run it because the HW vendor uses MS/Apple/etc's decisions as
| a chance to force their customers to upgrade to the latest HW.
| Frequently when the old stuff continues to work just fine.
|
| So IMHO this is a giant middle finger from the OS vendors to
| their customers, because (as an OS developer myself) dropping
| support for these kinds of things are rarely done because its
| costing developer time to have modules that are mostly untouched
| for years in the tree, or infrequently provide a small shim from
| the new driver model to the old one. And even when it turns out
| to be real effort, the OS vendors show us they can provide very
| transparent shims as long as it benefits them and not a second
| longer (ex most recently doing transparent x86 emulation on arm
| based machines).
| Gigachad wrote:
| Apparently the Apple Silicon macs don't have the capability of
| running 32bit binaries. Since this software is abandoned, it's
| not like a longer support window would have given them time to
| recompile the drivers.
| zokier wrote:
| * * *
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad
| after about a decade. If that happens you're looking at a 3,000
| Euro repair bill if you can find someone with the parts capable
| of replacing them. Hasselblad will still repair them but it's a
| pain to get the scanner to them and they charge almost twice as
| much as third part service shops.
|
| ...
|
| > This thing is remarkable. The bigger brother (the X5) even more
| so. Imacon/Hasselblad had a load of patents on the technology
| that means no other manufacturer can replicate it. There are
| other high spec scanning solutions, of course, but none that come
| close to this form factor.
|
| ...
|
| > 15 years passed, at which point Hasselblad discontinued the
| scanners. The cost of modernising the interfaces was not worth
| it. In fact, only 7 years passed before Hasselblad effectively
| discontinued them as that was when they stopped updating the
| software.
|
| This is the dark side of patents.
|
| A company that has used the patent system to run everyone else
| out of business despite not being particularly innovative (the
| author describes a "simple" system for assuring the film is
| perfectly flat), refuses to keep their product line up-to-date or
| properly support it, charges a fortune for a service that from
| the sounds of it doesn't actually fix the problem with the
| interfaces, which may have been purposefully designed to fail
| anyway...and an entire market segment just dies.
|
| It's sad that those $3000 bills for repair will probably be going
| to organizations like museums trying to preserve their
| collections or make them more accessible. Or be unaffordable to
| such organizations.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Yep, I deal with this all the time in industrial automation.
| It's even worse than the consumer space there, because the cost
| of breaking stuff is so high that the default is to invent
| something and then coast on your laurels for a few decades.
| Infrastructure and tooling that somebody's dad bought 30 years
| ago is now too expensive to update, so you keep it limping
| along well past its normal service life...
|
| In particular, the author laments the high cost of scans:
|
| > Here in Switzerland I am looking at a cost of around 30.- CHF
| a frame minimum if I get a third party to scan them for me.
|
| And worries that you have to have something like the 2007 iMac
| to run it:
|
| > So you need a dedicated old rig to run the proprietary
| software to drive the scanner.
|
| But doesn't seem to quite connect 2 and 2 together: Those third
| party shops all have ancient dedicated rigs that they bought a
| decade or two ago. The use of that equipment is what your $30
| per scan is buying! There are label printers and laser markers
| and time clocks and press brakes and CNCs and inventory
| management systems at shops all over the world, running some
| PLC RTOS from the 90s, or DOS or Windows 98 with PXI cards or
| printer parallel ports or even completely proprietary logic
| boards, that are decades old and you can't get parts or service
| or updates for them.
|
| It's ubiquitous in any less profitable industries that aren't
| on the cutting edge.
|
| It's hard to maintain and gradually update this equipment. I
| fear it's going to get harder as IIoT services die off and
| engineered lifetimes shrink. It's hard to debug a machine built
| before the Internet, with coffee-stained schematics and only
| enough IDE hard drive space for 8-character variable names, but
| I worry it will be harder still to debug a machine built well
| after the Internet with ubiquitous documentation available only
| behind a login to a server that's no longer online and enough
| hard drive space for gigabytes of third-party libraries...
| pathartl wrote:
| They might have a patent on this particular setup, but the
| FlexTight system produces worse results compared to traditional
| drum scanning. Due to the way it uses a lens between the CCD
| sensor and the drum also means that you get some quality issues
| around the edges of larger frames. It also means you can't scan
| large formats like 8x10. It's cool tech and it is a shame that
| it's stuck behind patents, but it's not like there's not other
| options out there.
|
| Also the hardware is funny. IIRC they didn't iterate on the
| actual components much, and the move to FireWire basically just
| integrated a SCSI->FireWire adapter into the case. I haven't
| seen the inside of an X1/X5, but I'd be interested if these
| could be repaired by using a different SCSI adapter of some
| type.
| georgebcrawford wrote:
| Your Formula Non photos are incredible. I love the banality of
| behind-the-scenes to be found at sporting events, especially
| longer ones.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| > The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit
| architecture and hasn't been updated in well over 10 years
|
| Might be worth it to try using Wine to run the windows software
| if they have windows drivers. Wine should run on mac if that's
| your poison.
|
| > It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad
| after about a decade. If that happens you're looking at a 3,000
| Euro repair bill
|
| A soldering iron is cheap, and so are firewire ports on digikey.
| I doubt they invented their own proprietary firewire connection.
| Ferrari's use volvo parts, you can probably fix it for like $3.
| elahieh wrote:
| Sounds like maintaining these high end medium format cameras and
| scanners can be a real hassel.
|
| I have a Nikon Coolscan V and nothing is wrong with it but the
| switch, but it's hardly worth repairing or trying to sell on
| eBay. Working, it might be worth more than I paid for in c2005.
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| I see your blad pun, and I leica it
| jonas-w wrote:
| > "can be a real hassel"
|
| haha, i see what you did there
| ortusdux wrote:
| Could you use a 35mm condenser enlarger to project the image
| directly onto a scanner bed? You would probably need to disable
| the light in the scanner, remove the glass, and upgrade the light
| in the enlarger.
| munhitsu wrote:
| [dead]
| pkd wrote:
| I don't have to create 160cm wide prints but I have scanned
| medium format frames on an Epson v600 flatbed and the results
| with the right software is more than serviceable. In fact, Nick
| Carver uses a v800 to scan fairly high quality images he creates
| big prints from. Although he does go to a drum scanner shop for
| the mammoth 6x17 prints but it simply goes to show that the
| return on value is very high on the right consumer grade scanner.
| pathartl wrote:
| My dad used to produce prints in the 90's with a hybrid
| digital/film workflow. Scan with a FlexTight -> post in
| Photoshop -> write back to 4x5 with a LaserGraphics film
| recorder -> darkroom printing. Using this process he did up to
| I want to say 40x48 prints.
| LegitShady wrote:
| someone shooting on a vintage hasselblad that still costs used
| near as much as many modern high tech cameras and printing
| 5'x2' finished pictures isn't interested in serviceable.
| serviceable isn't the result they're looking for.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Nikon made a massive medium-format scanner, too: The Super
| Coolscan 9000[0].
|
| That's supported by VueScan[1].
|
| [0]
| https://www.filmscanner.info/en/NikonSuperCoolscan9000ED.htm...
|
| [1]
| https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#...
| keithbingman wrote:
| I used to work in a photo studio in Germany, we had 2 of these
| and the predecessor to the Hasselblad/Imacon X1. The difference
| between them was amazing. I'd still love to have one of those
| Coolscan 9000s, they are great machines. Even back then (around
| 2004) we used Vuescan for the Nikons. It was already an issue
| to get up to date drivers for our Macs.
| neilv wrote:
| One way to avoid the problems of devices no longer supported by
| drivers is to use open source software _and put pressure on
| vendors_.
|
| Linux was gaining ground on open source drivers this for a while,
| but then it seemed like we started to backslide.
|
| Open source works best if more people treat it like a marriage
| commitment, not the occasional random holiday fling.
| hvs wrote:
| This is nice-sounding, but ultimately there is almost no
| incentive for hardware manufacturers to open source their
| drivers. Linux isn't a large market and macOS and Windows users
| generally aren't concerned with it. On top of that, many of
| these products (though maybe not the one in particular) is
| basically disposable.
|
| The way this is handled in industry is to have 20-year-old
| computer running Windows XP that is just for a specific product
| that only has drivers for one version of Windows.
| neilv wrote:
| If more people committed to open source, there would be more
| pressure on hardware vendors.
|
| I suppose all that's needed is for a good chunk of Windows
| and Mac users to stop thinking of open source as only Vegas
| flings of opportunity, and more like a life partner.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Has this ever worked? Even now it seems that hardly any vendors
| put out linux software and when they do it's garbage that tries
| to import shared libraries that existed on ubuntu 13.04 or
| something. Almost all the hardware support on linux came from
| people in the linux space reverse engineering and developing
| those drivers which are then in a state that can be upstreamed.
|
| The wine/proton project has had far far more impact than
| decades of posting on game forums asking for a linux build.
| kaoD wrote:
| As I see it open source killed free software. We don't need
| open source, we need free software. Stallman was right, as he
| always is with these things.
|
| It's a meaningful distinction and the fact that open source
| mindshare won is what effectively killed any momentum that free
| software had.
|
| Software freedom completely disappeared from the public
| discourse and it was _not_ fortuitous.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Open source (OSI definition) is exactly the same thing as
| Free Software (FSF definition) so your comment makes no sense
| without clarifying further? Are you perhaps referring to
| Source Available software vs OS/FS?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The reason is probably that there are way way less devices in
| use now. Graphics cards are made by 2+1 companies (nvidia, amd
| and somewhat intel), webcams are uvc compatible, mice and
| keyboards are "driverless", there are less and less printers
| and scanners in use, and even those are wireless, noone uses
| digital cameras with need for gphoto2 anymore (either mobile
| phones or pro equipment and a card reader), flash drivers are
| all the same, soundcards are mostly onboard now, screens are
| all the same, etc... so no critical mass to bother companies
| anymore.
|
| Back in the time you had a bunch of soundcars, palm pilots with
| activesync, lpt printers, usb printers, scsi printers, zip,
| jazz drives, etc.
|
| The only pain currently are unstable wifi drivers, because
| there are still quite a few chipset makers) and well.. custom
| equipment used by a handful of people, such as op here.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)