[HN Gopher] I almost bought a scanner
___________________________________________________________________
I almost bought a scanner
Author : leejo
Score : 415 points
Date : 2023-01-25 22:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (leejo.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (leejo.github.io)
| yread wrote:
| I don't know anything about scanning film, but perhaps a
| microscope scanner could be used to do that? 8000ppi is nothing
| for those, there you're looking at ~10 pixels per micron (see
| https://cancer.digitalslidearchive.org/#!/CDSA/acc/TCGA-OR-A...
| ). If you can fix the film somehow to a pathology glass slide
| (75x26mm) you could load 100s in the machine and have it scanned
| overnight. It will be multiple GBs per slide though.
|
| They do cost about 2x-20x as much but they are fairly ubiquitous
| in research hospitals or universities. Some (like Philips) also
| have annoying software so people are getting rid of them for
| cheap
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Some (like Philips)_
|
| What a shock. Wish I knew what internal culture/decision making
| process, lead Philips to such horrid everything software.
|
| It's a teaching moment for others.
| dylan604 wrote:
| which is odd, as I've been playing with home LED lighting
| searching for non-Hue lights. not one of them and their
| accompanying software can hold a candle to what the Philips
| Hue app and control of the lights can do. Hue may be more
| expensive, but the hassle free and ease of use goes a long
| way.
|
| So did Philips farm this one out?
| noisy_boy wrote:
| The relatively smaller no. of people would put up with the
| quirks of speciality wonky software as long as it get the
| job done somehow, but the much larger no. of average
| consumers won't put up with a buggy software that fails to
| make the bulb do what they want. So better UI, better
| testing and so on.
| desro wrote:
| Philips Hue is primarily farmed out to Signify, a company
| in the Netherlands. I'm unsure of the specific nature of
| the arrangement, though.
|
| "The lamps are currently created and manufactured by
| Signify N.V., formerly the Philips Lighting division of
| Royal Philips N.V"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_Hue
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.
| spython wrote:
| That sounds very interesting, but where would you get the right
| software and drivers for the scanner?
| infinet wrote:
| Not familiar with Philips, but other microscope scanners I
| used, Aperio, Leica, Zeiss, all have dedicated computer
| attach to them, with special, sometimes strange looking
| interface card. They have precision stage, which holds glass
| slides, move under lens. USB is becoming common especially
| for transferring image. The software and driver is part of
| the scanner. Resolution of these scanner is quite high, but
| generally their lens (microscope objective) have very short
| work distance to the slide, usually less than 2mm, sometimes
| less than 1mm. So need to find a way to keep the film flat on
| the supporting glass slide while the distance between film
| and objective is still short. The output is limited to the
| vendor format. Most of the time is 8bits per RGB channel. An
| annoying character of the microscope scanners is their color
| is not accurate. One might get notable different color from
| the same slide with different scanner model. Therefor they
| may not suitable for scanning film.
| causality0 wrote:
| Ok, so the old Hasselblad scanners are breaking down and his big
| box store scanner isn't good enough. The unanswered question I
| have is why he doesn't buy a modern professional scanner. Modern
| pro scanners blow past his 8000 dpi benchmark at less than a
| quarter the cost of the old Hasselblad.
| PishER wrote:
| [flagged]
| PishER wrote:
| Never heard of a 8000 dpi benchmark before. I have to look into
| it.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Can you link to one?
| causality0 wrote:
| For example, the Epson Perfection V850 Pro scanner has an
| optical resolution of 6400dpi for $1300 while doing the full
| bed, greatly exceeding the X1's 3200dpi in that mode. If you
| want to match the film scanning performance, the Plustek
| OpticFilm 8200i SE film scanner has a resolution of 7200dpi
| for just $400.
| buster3000 wrote:
| I have that scanner you're talking about and a Nikon V ED.
| The Nikon with 'only' 4000dpi massively out-resolves the
| V850. It's true resolution is somewhere just over 2000dpi
| and that's after adjusting the trays height.
|
| Because of that I only use the V850 for 4x5 and 120. It's a
| waste of time for 35mm even if it's quicker to scan
| multiple frames.
| flipthefrog wrote:
| PlusTek and Epson are absolutely nowhere near the quality
| of discontinued scanners like FlexTight, Nikon CoolScan and
| Fuji Frontier. Modern scanners claim high DPIs, but the
| real resolution is far below. What good is scanning at 6400
| dpi if the lens only resolves at 3000 dpi. I've scanned
| multiple tests on an Epson 700 myself, and found that there
| was no visible difference between scanning at full and half
| resolution.
|
| See https://www.filmscanner.info/en/FilmscannerTestberichte
| .html for very detailed tests of scanners, including
| claimed vs real DPI
| [deleted]
| KaiserPro wrote:
| there are two key points to remember here
|
| 1) optical resolution is not the same as DPI (which I think you
| know, but its worth pointing out for those people chatting at
| the back of the class)
|
| 2) the way they film is placed on the scanner makes a huge
| difference to the quality.
|
| the hassblad scanner effectively sucks the film down onto some
| sort of curved plate, which means that the optics can assume
| that the film is going to be at position x +- 0.05mm. This is
| critical because the closer the sensor is to the film, the more
| the placement affects the quality.
|
| This means that in most highend cases, the film holder has a
| greater bearing on quality than the sensor/optics.
|
| I have the advantage that at work I have access to a medium
| format digital camera. This means that I can take really good
| macro pictures of film negatives. but because the film isn't
| flat, its a challenge to accurately capture the entire frame. I
| need to get a proper film gate that slightly tensions the film
| to make it straight. then I need to worry about getting the
| camera at 90 degrees to the film.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| If you can virtualize the FireWire connection you can probably
| make this work by running a supported OS in a VM.
| pmarreck wrote:
| this is one of the reasons I would highly recommend digitizing
| any analog film media you might have lying around that has any
| value whatsoever. Technology like this, that greatly assists in
| "crossing over" the old media to the forever-digital media, is
| disappearing in accessibility due to lack of utility - once
| everyone goes digital-native (which has already occurred), there
| is less and less of a reason to have high quality analog to
| digital converters.
| foobarian wrote:
| I have a stash of old black & white photos from my
| grandparents' youth. They are nice but I would love to digitize
| them and was wondering if there is a better way than a flatbed
| scanner built into one of those cheapo Canon MGX inkjet all-in-
| one printers. Ultimately I want to run the scans through some
| colorizing filters and reprint them into an album to make a fun
| xmas present.
| flipthefrog wrote:
| No, your top priorty should be washing the film thoroughly to
| get all the fix out after developing. Then store it properly in
| a dark and not to warm and humid area. That way, it will last
| for centuries (at least for black and white) and can be
| rescanned every time the digital files are lost
| pmarreck wrote:
| Ah yes. The "hope a flood or fire or theft or loss or
| baby/dog got to it and tried to eat it or simple human
| forgetfulness never happens" plan. That deserves not only a
| "no thanks," but a "that is a fucking ridiculous and quaint
| but also very sad (in the sense that this person has not
| realized that all analog media is already dead) notion"
|
| Also, you missed the entire point of my comment. "Rescanning"
| will one day NOT be possible, at least not cheaply or without
| great effort. The market for people scanning analog to
| digital will dwindle to nothing, and thus the products that
| try to satisfy that market will also, unless you will be
| willing to fork over a ton of money for something custom.
|
| The best you'll get is a bad reproduction taken with a cell
| camera of the original media that is then perhaps "enhanced"
| (read: pixels are invented out of thin air that were never
| there to begin with) by some AI.
| gsich wrote:
| DSLR/M scanning is the way to go.
| 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
| kkukshtel wrote:
| I shoot lots of 120mm on a Mamiya 7 and am currently stuck with
| an Epson V600 as my best option. Unfortunately, the scanning
| experience sucks for 6x7 photos because of how not-long the bed
| is. You can only scan two 6x7 photos at a time, and then have
| to turn the film around. It's a tedious process that means most
| of my film remains unscanned.
|
| As others have mentioned here I am also looking into trying to
| fauxscan with a DSLR and a macro lens, but I'm also wondering
| if there is enough of a market/interest in a more DIY/FOSS
| scanning project.
|
| I've considered trying to build something more standard that
| could be printed or manufactured, that combines some small
| pointgrey (CV) cameras and macro lens, a light, and some film
| rolling mechanism to keep the film tight - the idea being that
| you could basically "scan" the film as a moving roll, scanning
| a whole 120mm roll in seconds. Pointgrey cameras also have a
| great api, so you could actually build software on top of it.
|
| I've long thought about putting time to this, but the
| intersection of pro film shooters and programmers is so small
| that I'm not sure it would be worth it. If anyone else is
| interested in the idea, I'd be happy to collaborate on it!
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Scanning medium format can be a pain but I've had decent
| results with an Epson V700 for 4x5 film. A lot more cost
| effective than a Flextight and I maintain some VMs with the
| firmware on various operating systems that have traveled with
| me through various desktop builds.
|
| I'd like to see some better FOSS options but images are a lot
| better quality than they were using cheap desktop film scanners
| in 2005.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think there are adapters for digicams.
| omoikane wrote:
| Nikon has one: https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-
| explore/a/tips-and-tec...
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| Here is one from Pentax https://www.imaging-
| resource.com/news/2014/04/21/pentax-film...
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| My EPSON flatbed film scanner is bad, especially for 120mm
| film, but... that was cheaper than 10 rolls of film scanned in
| low res for me.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Another one is that nobody made a feeder for movie film, for
| ANY of the consumer or "prosumer" scanners at any price.
|
| If you want film scanned today to individual files per frame,
| it's still a bunch of money if you can find someone to do it...
| and good luck getting it done right.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The movie film scanners that are top notch are easily in the
| six figure range, and go up depending on the features. In a
| past life, I was researching a scanner to buy for film
| restoration purposes, and I can't remember the name of the
| company or unit, but it would move each frame into place and
| then "gently" press down to flatten the film, and then triple
| flash it to monochrome CCD with the appropriate RGB filter.
| It was a big machine and with the flattening and triple
| flashing was not real time capable, but not as slow as I
| would have expected. Somewhere between 12-18fps for 2K and
| slowed down for 4K+ scanning. The project was never funded,
| so it was all for naught, but I enjoy getting to research new
| toys like that while on the clock so to speak.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| Our company FilmLight used to build such scanners, called
| Northlight. Similar scanners were ARRI Scan.
|
| It used an 8K line array CCD, and pulled a film frame
| across by locking the frame in a gate and moving the gate
| with a servo.
|
| Indeed, 6 figures for one of these machines.
|
| https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/support/documents/other/legacy
| _...
| dylan604 wrote:
| The Northlight is definitely one of the units we looked
| at, and was a top contender. Ultimately, it was between
| the Northlight and a second vendor, but funding was
| pulled before we ever got to make a decision. So, no new
| toys for me and the team =(
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| I understand (I work in the industry), but the point still
| stands that these companies could have added greatly to the
| appeal of their scanners by offering a motion-picture
| attachment, no matter how slow.
|
| I was considering trying to build one out of an inspection
| microscope, but gave it up and just had my most-important
| reels scanned to TIFFs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I was considering trying to build one out of an
| inspection microscope, but gave it up
|
| justifying the cost of the people that did not give up
| and made an actual product. "if this shit was easy,
| everyone would do it!" is something i remind myself all
| the time
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Sure. I don't begrudge the cost of the devices. In this
| case I'm calling out the missed opportunity of having
| built most of such a device already and not following
| through to expand its appeal to more potential customers
| by offering a particular accessory.
|
| Also the opposing viewpoint to remind yourself of is that
| hey, SOMEBODY was the first to make one of these things
| and started a company to do it! I've given up on ideas
| before starting because of the manufacturing technology
| required, only to see a company like GoPro come out of
| nowhere and own a market segment.
| TheCipster wrote:
| I know this is 100% DIY but the Gugusse Roller is awesome for
| this task:
| <http://www.deniscarl.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start>
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Cool! Thanks for the link. I checked out a few DIY projects
| years ago, and even bought a few broken Super-8 projectors
| to scrounge their film-advance mechanisms. But I haven't
| revisited the state of the DIY art for a long time.
| ezconnect wrote:
| He can even go higher resolution by using microscope.
| 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You don't "need" much tbh. My setup is a cardboard tube, a
| lens I found in a broken scanner and some tape. I'm using an
| old kindle as backlight since it doesn't have pixels = no
| need for diffusion.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Do you just use the central portion for the negative, or do
| you correct for optics somehow (ala flat frames in astro)?
| seszett wrote:
| If you don't use a planar lens it will never really look
| good.
|
| What I do for my part is just use an enlarger to which I
| attach my digital camera with various tubes and adapters to
| get the distances right, and an enlarger lens. These lenses
| are infinitely cheaper than "regular" planar lenses and
| they're just made exactly for the job, and the whole
| assembly is rigid and aligned so it's easy to get the whole
| negative right.
| 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?
| lm28469 wrote:
| I'd recommend https://grain2pixel.com. It's free, works
| good and the creator answered my emails in less than a
| day
| keithbingman wrote:
| I've just been doing it in Photoshop. I have primarily
| Black and White negatives with a few E6 slides, so it's
| pretty easy.
| 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 ;)
| metadat wrote:
| I'd never heard of this.
|
| https://petapixel.com/2017/02/14/wet-mount-scanning-get-
| high...
|
| Can you really get 80% of the detail like with the Hasselblad
| X1 with your phone?
|
| For the wet scanning is it a regular consumer grade scanner
| or something specific / special? How do the results compare
| to the X1?
| codpiece wrote:
| Wet scanning was the default for drum scanners, the gold
| standard in the 90s. Essentially, you lay a drop of mineral
| oil on the glass drum, create a bond with the negative and
| then tape it down for good measure since the drum spun at a
| pretty good clip.
|
| Wet scanning is worthwhile if you have a higher-end flatbed
| scanner like the Epson V700, 750 and 900(?) because they
| use higher-quality sensors and real lenses.
|
| I almost bought a drum scanner a decade ago but would have
| to maintain a Mac Quadra for it to run. For large format
| film, a wet mount scan on an Epson V750 with VueScan
| software is great.
| philjohn wrote:
| And I wonder if this is the scanning equivalent of wet
| lithography for making microchips?
| NegativeK wrote:
| I suspect they're referring to "80% of what I want out of
| it," not "80% of the detail."
| exabrial wrote:
| I still don't understand why 32bit can't be executed in a special
| process mode or in Rosetta. Just seems like a ridiculous hill to
| die on. Few apps use more than 4gb of memory.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Doesn't really feel like Apple died on this hill. It's been
| years now and other than old obscure hardware, there hasn't
| been any real loss. Even looking at my steam library, it seems
| like basically everything made it over in the end.
| nicoburns wrote:
| What's the best option for standard 35mm film? I have a bunch of
| negatives sat in a box that I'd love to get digital copies of
| before they end up getting damaged. Should I buy a scanner? Or am
| I best off using a a scanning service?
| atoav wrote:
| IMO as a person who did a lot of analog photography going to a
| decent lab and having _them_ scan it will be the best option
| unless you plan to develope and scan a film every month.
|
| Buying a scanner of a quality that matches the lab is a not
| going to be cheap and unless you have a steady output of
| negatives (or a _huge_ collection of material and the the time
| to scan it) it is not going to pay off.
|
| I'd say go to the lab unless you wanna have the scanner for
| other things (e.g. artwork).
| 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!
| Wistar wrote:
| You are a blessing. I need a high rez scanning solution and I
| think you may have solved it for me.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Amazing. Sometimes the Internet disappoints, but sometimes the
| Internet is fricking awesome. Well done.
| pathartl wrote:
| My biggest gripe is when people don't document fixes. This
| whole rabbit hole started because Hasselblad removed the
| software downloads from their site and the rest of the
| community doesn't really have a clue when it comes to
| software preservation. Flat CMS's are important to the
| process as well. It looks like Archive.org picked up on the
| page because of this post and made a couple snapshots: https:
| //web.archive.org/web/20230126040120/https://pathar.tl...
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Side-by-side with my Nikon Coolscan and a professional
| "Premium" scan from a high-end lab it's clear the Coolscan
| beats flatbed even now.
| whitemary wrote:
| The epson consumer scanners are good. Really good. But they are
| nothing like drum scanners and other professional scanners.
| jojobas wrote:
| Again, how? Once you get to the grain there's no more
| information to extract.
| s800 wrote:
| I have an Epson V800 and a Flextight, the output is much
| better on the flex tight. There's more to it than just the
| manufacturer's DPI flex.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| Because Epson scanners don't actually resolve the grain.
| Low resolution scans tend to exaggerate grain... which can
| make you think you're resolving the grain.
|
| Also, photos aren't only about resolution and sharpness.
| Colour and tone reproduction is also important. And
| consumer scanners are acceptable, but nowhere near as good
| as drum scanners. Even minilab scanners (Fuji Frontier,
| Noritsu) are no match for drum scanners.
| whitemary wrote:
| What do you mean by "get"? I have an Epson V700. I have
| done plenty of side by side comparisons. The sharpness of
| the grain in the scan is what matters, not merely "getting"
| the grain. To speak of the resolution of a film exposure is
| incoherent. Grain != pixels. The V700 is also inconsistent
| because of the floppy plastic mounts and because they lack
| a mechanism to really keep the film flat.
| jojobas wrote:
| If you can see individual grains you are already limited
| by the film itself, anything beyond that is noise.
| Sharper grain is just a higher spatial frequency noise.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| It sounds like you haven't done a lot of film scanning
| besides perhaps an Epson.
| chrstphrknwtn wrote:
| You can do quite a bit better than Epson flatbed scanners.
| buster3000 wrote:
| It can't. It really can't. Even with betterscanning.com holders
| you can't beat dedicated film scanners or dlsr scans. Drum-scan
| obviously being the best. I've never wet mounted on flatbeds so
| can't comment.
|
| My almost 2decades old Nikon V-ED, which I bought when it came
| out, still outperforms the most expensive flatbed you can buy
| now (V850-pro), which I also have.
|
| If you're interested
| https://www.filmscanner.info/en/FilmscannerTestberichte.html...
| educate you without having to buy anything to find out for
| yourself.
| groos wrote:
| I wonder if there is an alternate optical solution using a macro
| lens. Use an even backlight and a dedicated macro lens to take a
| digital picture of the negative and postprocess. This is
| essentially what the Hasselblad scanner seems to be doing.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| I use a copy stand, light table, and glass plate with a 1:1
| macro lens. Stitching for medium and large format negs. It
| works quite well.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| That's basically how everyone did internegatives, but with
| the lights on.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Ten years ago I paid for some proprietary software to help me
| collate my photographic archive. The project was very successful
| but the software is also 32bit Intel only. Since Catalina onwards
| I have not been able to access the archive at all. It causes me a
| lot of anxiety.
|
| Thanks Adobe / Apple! Hopefully Lightroom 6 runs on Windows, but
| I just never seem to have gotten around to trying. I think it's
| mostly out of fear that it won't work and I will realize I am
| shut out of my collection metadata forever.
| non-nil wrote:
| Lightroom 6? Good news, you can relax!
|
| It does run on Windows, and on the Mac you have the option av
| installing the current versions from Adobe. Even without an
| active subscription, you'll still have access to the library
| module (i.e. all your metadata) and can do various exports etc.
| t3estabc wrote:
| [dead]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| I just bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 off of eBay recently, and
| upgrading to macOS Monterey has made it unreadable. Time to
| downgrade back to Mojave by way of Time Machine, because Apple
| hates legacy hardware of third party OEMs, never mind its own.
| fmajid wrote:
| ExactScan Pro supports the S1500M on modern versions of macOS,
| and is superior to ScanSnap's own software in most ways. Mojave
| won't help, I had to switch to ExactScan when I "upgraded" to
| Mojave (although I believe Fujitsu brought back S1500M support
| in the original ScanSnap software on Mojave by popular demand a
| few years later).
|
| Treasure it, the S1500M uses a CCD sensor, unlike all
| subsequent ScanSnaps that use inferior CIS sensors with much
| worse color fidelity, and even photo-oriented models like the
| Epson FastFoto series:
|
| https://blog.majid.info/scanner-group-test/
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It was previously scanning on Mojave for me, but good to
| know, maybe I can use ExactScan Pro to get it to recognize my
| S1500M without me having to downgrade. I had stayed on that
| macOS release for quite some time for 32-bit app support, not
| to mention updating to Monterey also borked my MBP's ability
| to recognize NTFS drives, needing me to get Paragon NTFS.
| fmajid wrote:
| Well, I'm on Ventura 13.2 on my new Mac Studio and
| ExactScan Pro works just fine on my S1500M.
| monksy wrote:
| I have a Snapscan S1300i, SANE and linux still works with it. I
| have no complaints about this device. Other than the USB B
| cable endpoint.
| Gigachad wrote:
| At this point I've got devices with basically every single
| usb type and I'll have to keep cables around for them all.
| The only one that actually seems to have dropped out of
| existence is micro usb 3.0 which had the little wing bit
| sticking out the side you used to get on phones and portable
| hard drives.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| !! I have a S1300, was going to scan stuff soon. Yikes, I
| didn't think it wouldn't work. Have you tried VueScan software?
| I have a license for VueScan and can try it out later tonight.
|
| (I also have a S1100 which Fujitsu sent me because a won an
| online draw!)
| dietrichepp wrote:
| I have a bunch of 120 film that I'd like to get better scans of
| someday. The old Flextight scanners were on my radar, as well as
| the Coolscan 9000. I still wonder what the best way to scan these
| old negatives is. I have some scans done with one of the Epson
| flatbeds, but they're limited in what you can get out of them.
| I've also taken some shots to get drum scanned, which gives
| fantastic results, but isn't justifiable given the quantity of
| film I want to scan.
|
| I've considered trying to get an old drum scanner and learning to
| do it myself but it would require some dedicated space which I
| don't have right now.
|
| A lot of these shots were taken carefully, with good exposure, on
| a tripod, good focus, correct aperture, and slow film (by modern
| standards). There's an enormous amount of detail in some of these
| negatives which just doesn't show up in most scans. On optical
| prints I can even count the stitches in people's clothing from
| full-body portraits, if I look at the print with a loupe.
|
| I _had_ hoped that film scanners would get cheaper as time went
| on, and some day I would just be able to buy a nice scanner and
| just plow through my film. Seems like my best hope is for
| somebody to make a jig where I can connect a digital camera and
| use that as a makeshift scanner--I know these jigs exist, but MF
| film is still a bit of a beast.
| fmajid wrote:
| If you want to buy new, an Epson V850 is your only real option
| nowadays.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| That's why I'm looking at used gear--the Epson flatbeds just
| aren't nearly good enough.
| fmajid wrote:
| Yes, but the used scanners are at least 10 years old at
| this point, have precision mechanical parts like steppers
| and gear trains that will wear out eventually. If it was
| (hard) used by a service bureaum as is quite possible, it
| probably has few cycles left.
| dietrichepp wrote:
| Right, but as I said, I already have scans done with an
| Epson flatbed and I want something better.
| totetsu wrote:
| I made the big mistake of purchasing a "CZUR Book Scanning
| solution" the year before last. The camera on it is sooo shit
| that I ended up just resting my phone on top of the thing and
| getting better results just using it as a lamp.. Sure there is
| some laser contour detection of pages and then flattening, if you
| use their windows only software to with it, but the resolution is
| so low its only good for black and white text only books.
| robocat wrote:
| Also see a hacker with an excellent write-up about getting a
| commercial Kodak (OEM Pakon) 35mm scanner from the 2000's working
| on Windows 11:
| https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2022/09/04/pakon-reverse-...
| discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714806
| fauxreb wrote:
| Oof, I did all of this, for years.
|
| I had a Nikon Coolscan 9000 that was the best scanner I ever
| had for 35mm and 120mm film. I worked professionally and would
| submit perfect scans to clients and retouchers that were far
| better than anything the labs were producing.
|
| I bought a Pakon (Dogbowl variant) and modded an old Macbook
| Air to run it. It was great.
|
| But, again and again, I found myself running up against entropy
| of time and software. It was always going to fail. I miss my
| Rolleiflex, I miss my Leica, I miss my Mamiya RZ and my Mamiya
| 7II. I miss film and writing shot notes in my notebook.
|
| But the manufacturers and the labs are all going in one
| direction, digital, and the price of film and development is
| rising.
|
| Since I've moved to Amsterdam from NYC I've looked at
| darkrooms/dokas but it's all too hobbyist and caught in an
| older era. Reluctantly, I've gone all digital and adapted my
| workflow to make it less painful: profiles, curves, mobile
| cloud syncing, batch treatments, decent historical archiving.
|
| I've found a great digital printer and a great print shop, and
| now the only real issue if finding a good framer.
| 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?
| stuaxo wrote:
| That's a pain. I think SANE/TWAIN bridge is a thing.
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Intel Macs do, though; until Apple removed it. Worked fine in
| Mojave, but me (and many others) one day rebooted our Macs to
| find dozens of programs, libraries and plugins that no longer
| worked.
|
| Whole thing sorta smells like Apple trying to further assert
| the dominance of AArch64, what with their insane stake in the
| ISA and it's eventual dominance. Not a terrible thing
| inherently, but the push to depreciate 32-bit hardware and
| software alike was pointless. 32-bit ARM can (and should)
| live alongside AArch64 as an ISA. From what I understand, the
| M1 even has secure 32-bit emulation mode built-in, without
| any OS functionality to leverage it.
|
| Whatever Apple does, it's hard for developers to treat the
| Mac like a regular development target now. Besides the ISA
| change, the push for Metal-agnostic GPU pipelines has left
| developers scrambling. Massive open projects like Blender
| didn't even have an Apple Silicon strategy until Apple
| sponsored one. It's a bit of a mess, and kinda tragic that
| Apple is pointlessly complicating cross-platform development.
| wombat_trouble wrote:
| For all the hate Microsoft regularly gets, they are pretty
| amazing about that: I have ancient software that still runs
| fine on Windows 11 through layers upon layers of
| compatibility libraries baked into the OS.
|
| I'm sure it's costing them dearly, but there's plenty of
| niche and industrial hardware like this that lasts much
| longer than a generation of operating systems, and there's
| no alternative. Linux pays lip service to compatibility,
| but ABIs change constantly and it's easy to get stuck in
| dependency hell. MacOS X is... MacOS X.
| Moru wrote:
| Speaking of smelly: My scanner just broke down last week.
| The powersupply started smelling burned plastic and then
| gave up the ghost completely. Can't find a powersuppy
| fitting the special contact. It has been working since
| windows 95 or so, was now running windows 10 without
| problems and without having to install special drivers from
| the producer. Old was a canon, early USB model.
| [deleted]
| snvzz wrote:
| >the Apple Silicon macs don't have the capability of running
| 32bit binaries.
|
| It could be possible, with emulation, to run even 68000
| binaries targetting the original Mac's operating system.
|
| ... if Apple cared. They very obviously do not.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yes, Apple only cares about allowing supported software to
| easily keep running. This means they can implement more
| modern and secure systems than Microsoft is able to
| achieve. It's also the reason Windows is plagued with 32
| bit software currently in development as MS has no way to
| push for the removal of obsolete features.
| cm2187 wrote:
| And also the reason why no large company will touch macos
| (and I imagine it is the same thing server side).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _It 's also the reason Windows is plagued with 32 bit
| software currently in development_
|
| What's wrong with 32-bit software? If you don't need more
| than 4GB of virtual memory, you've got half the memory
| footprint for pointers.
| Gigachad wrote:
| One major issue is it can't handle dates any further than
| 2038 which is getting uncomfortably close, especially
| when you have to handle future dates.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Windows doesn't use UNIX time. The SYSTEMTIME structure
| can go up to the year 30827. See
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/api/minwinba....
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 64-bit time_t works perfectly fine on 32-bit systems.
| That is completely unrelated to machine word size.
| TylerE wrote:
| Given the vast difference in power, it'd probably have been
| enough to just cascade all the various layers they already
| have. Arm > x86 > ppc > 68k
|
| Even if each layer loses, say, 50% performance, the fastest
| 68k was only 75mhz.
|
| (Although now that I think about it I think the handled the
| 68k/ppc transistion by just making everyone compile for
| both and slap em into the same binary. Memory is hazy..
| it's been at least 20 years since I've touched a classic
| mac)
| KerrAvon wrote:
| You're confusing the "fat" binary format that allowed
| developers to ship the same application file for both 68k
| and PowerPC with the emulator that allowed for
| compatibility with existing 68k code. Much of the OS and
| apps remained 68k to the end of classic Mac OS's life.
| zokier wrote:
| On the other hand, there is little that necessitates this sort
| of thing to be part of the OS instead of just being separate
| piece of software like VueScan
| walrus01 wrote:
| This isn't the MS-DOS/PC-DOS era where it was necessary for
| software to have full and direct access to communicate
| directly with the (ISA 16-bit bus attached, whatever)
| hardware and peripherals on a desktop workstation, because
| that can crash the whole multitasking OS.
|
| In the case of the scanner in the original post here which
| appears to be from the era of MacOS 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 , the
| operating system clearly doesn't let the scanning software
| talk DIRECTLY to it, there's an abtraction layer of some sort
| for the SCSI or (Firewire 400?) bus.
| saghm wrote:
| This paragraph from the blog post stuck out to me:
|
| > The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit
| architecture and hasn't been updated in well over 10 years.
| Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and
| refuse to open source it to allow others to do that, so you are
| stuck using an OS that can run it.
|
| It's fine if the scanner company doesn't think it's worth
| putting in the work to add 64-bit support to their software
| themselves, but they're the ones artificially making it harder
| to support indefinitely by keeping the code private despite
| seemingly having no plans to ever sell anything that uses it
| again. It seems weird to me to blame OS vendors for operating
| in bad faith when the people who own the actual code that no
| longer works aren't even willing to let anyone else attempt to
| do the work to update it for them.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| In business terms, open-sourcing a piece of software they
| haven't touched for ten years means spending a number of
| hours on doing that for no obvious gain1. Legal has to clear
| this for approval (risks? liability?), someone has to decide
| if opening up the code won't give away company IP, and
| someone has to actually find the source code (not a given at
| all), put a licence on it (going through legal again), upload
| it, and provide a minimum level of documentation.
|
| Doing nothing on the other hand, costs nothing.
|
| 1: There is the positive marketing you gain from such a move,
| but someone has to quantify if doing this is worth it.
| thenickdude wrote:
| You ought to be able to run a 32-bit VM and PCIe-passthrough an
| SCSI or Firewire card to it.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Apparently the real problem is the Firewire hardware in the
| scanner fails.
| sandos wrote:
| I don't know but I suspect the consumer grade scanner can
| actually be useful. Scan several times, stack the images, and
| then deconvolute them. I think you could probably get great
| quality. Now how long it would take I don't know, probably way
| too much time though.
| wrldos wrote:
| Ugh I'm doing this at the moment. I do not want ANYTHING to do
| with scanners. They are worse than printers for being complete
| ball aches.
|
| Using a light box and a Nikon Z50 and 50-250 lens arranged
| roughly like this: https://www.scantips.com/g4/p1230510.jpg
| dylan604 wrote:
| I would reach out to one of these 3rd party companies with one of
| these scanners and just talk to somebody. Even better if you can
| find one locally to talk to someone personally. If they are a
| large corporation with evilCorpOverlords, move to the next one to
| see if you can find a smaller company. Just talk about your
| project with them. I would be shocked if you didn't find some
| like minded person that would be willing to help get the scans
| done for you.
|
| I worked for large post facilities that would most definitely
| have told you to pound sand. I've also worked for smaller
| facilities that used the same equipment. We frequently would take
| on projects like this, especially if we were slow. It made those
| boring times in between projects much more interesting. Sometimes
| there was also something we learned in the process that made us
| even more experience for future projects. I've pushed to accept
| some of these jobs personally.
|
| At the end of the day, what's the worst that could happen from
| the conversation? They say no? Volunteer to come in and work with
| it yourself during off times or other types of ideas. Show them
| your passion for it, and get them excited for your project.
| You'll be amazed at what the community will do for others.
| dotsynergy_it wrote:
| you'd be surprised at how accomodating and chill people are in
| Switzerland (the writer mentions living there). i needed a
| couple prints for a birthday and my local shop was closed, so i
| went to a business that printed ads, banners, fliers, etc with
| incredibly expensive professional xerox printers. they printed
| what i needed, had me pay a fair price (less than the shop),
| and let me use their facilities for cutting/finishes.
| vinay427 wrote:
| I often got the sense, when living in Switzerland, that if
| there was a designated process for something it would nearly
| always be followed to the letter, which at least provided a
| great deal of certainty (although rarely the process didn't
| benefit either party). If there wasn't one in place, people
| seemed to operate using a healthy dose of understanding and
| common sense. This is true virtually everywhere but to
| varying degrees, with the two seemingly melded together more
| in some societies.
| leejo wrote:
| I reached out to a few people over a couple of months while
| testing the scanner, including a couple of third party
| service/repair shops. There are also dedicated user groups
| around these scanners that are all happy to help and give tips.
| They were extremely helpful but the conclusion was indeed that
| the Firewire port or main board is on the way out.
|
| It _is_ possible to fix it, and the third party service /repair
| shops do have the parts and expertise (some of them are former
| Hasselblad service employees). The problem is the cost. To
| quote: "The problem is when the FireWire port dies the only
| repair that is ever proven to be effective has been to replace
| the entire main board. I currently have sufficient parts to
| replace this should you wish. The price to completely refurbish
| the scanner and replace the main board is 2800+ VAT "
|
| So 5,000 Euro for the scanner then 3,500 Euro for the
| service/repair. That's a little bit more than I'm willing to
| drop on this project, especially given the other factors - it
| might need repair/service again in 12months time, the
| discontinued software and needing old OS/computers to run it.
| toyg wrote:
| I think parent poster meant asking them to scan images for
| you, rather than repairing a scanner. You mention the average
| cost for that in your post, but maybe going for someone who's
| doing it as a one-off rather than providing it as regular
| service could shrink down the price.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > when the FireWire port dies the only repair that is ever
| proven to be effective has been to replace the entire main
| board
|
| You aren't talking to the right person... A circuit board is
| a set of components and wires... With enough expertise, it's
| always possible to find and replace the faulty
| component/wire. Someone who says the whole board needs
| replacing simply doesn't have the expertise.
|
| It would be like hiring a builder to fix a window frame, and
| them saying "the only fix is to just knock the house down and
| buy a new one".
|
| Sometimes the expert time required to find the fault isn't
| worth it when a whole new board is cheap... But that isn't
| the case here.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| I agree with the thrust of what you're saying and OP should
| definitely take the board to someone who will do board
| rework and see what they say.
|
| But I don't agree with:
|
| >With enough expertise, it's always possible to find and
| replace the faulty component/wire.
|
| That depends on what's happened. If it's an ASIC or
| something else complicated and application specific that's
| died, then the thing is probably toast unless you can find
| another board that died of a different cause.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| A fair guess is mechanical strain on the port. The first one
| should do is to implement some kind of strain relief, like
| putting a donor Firewire port on a separate board or plate,
| like in desktop PCs.
| jxramos wrote:
| Interesting device
| https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/463799-REG/Hasselblad...
| XantosD wrote:
| I would love for the hacker crowd to start looking into
| repurposing old scanner technology.
|
| I am waiting EAGERLY for the first open source scanner made for
| negatives. It's so sorely missed, and so far i'm on my third
| flatbed and not happy at all. It's silly when the line-scanner is
| the same for all of them more or less.
|
| Someone should really do a reverse engineering on some of it.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://mitraprint.com/hasselblad-flextight-x1-scanner
| Zetobal wrote:
| I got an old Heidelberg Tango drum scanner [0] just for my dad's
| old full format images... If you set an ebay alarm, you can get
| them really cheap.
|
| [0]
| https://www.michaelstricklandimages.com/blog/2018/4/4/drum-s...
| codpiece wrote:
| Thanks a LOT! Now I have yet another piece of vintage equipment
| to lust after. Heidelbergs were awesome scanners.
|
| I would love to get my hands on an old commercial stat camera
| as well. And a barn to house all of this stuff in.
| codpiece wrote:
| Yep. I set up an alert...
| maz29 wrote:
| Shameless plug - I've built an app specially for eBay alerts
| that I needed for different products.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/tt/app/auction-watch-ebay-alerts/id16...
| buildbot wrote:
| VERY cool! So slow though compared to scanning with a camera,
| but 700MP...
| 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:
| I mentioned this in another comment, but sometimes people who
| are dealing with these systems just don't dive in far enough
| either. I was able to get my FlexTight scanner working on
| Windows 11 64-bit by modifying the INF for some existing
| 64-bit drivers. For some reason nobody had tried this before,
| or even just documented it. Even if there were no 64-bit
| drivers I've gotten it to work on a Windows 10 32-bit
| install.
|
| Especially in the photo world there's so much tech being
| used, but not a lot of people that understand the
| implementation/engineering of it. Not faulting them, but I
| can't tell you how many people I know that just work off
| external drives. No NAS, no backups, just originals spread
| across fragile external hard drives. Hell, I knew some people
| that up until ~2011 still stored originals on ZIP disks and
| never managed to move them to something a bit more stable.
|
| Going back and working on older Macs is an absolute pain. Now
| there's four separate architectures that may or may not have
| the right software/driver at varying levels of
| implementation. It's amazing how often the answer is "just
| use Windows". Not that it's perfect, but at least you weren't
| dumped like last week's spaghetti.
| leejo wrote:
| I dove in pretty far - to the point of running dtrace on
| the flexcolor software, and it seemed to get stuck in a
| thread that was receiving data from the scanner. The
| Firewire port is dying (well, now it seems to be dead) so
| this is not a software issue and more a "i'm not prepared
| to drop 5,000 Euro on something that may not be fixable".
| pathartl wrote:
| Yep, totally understand. I'd thought about refurbing
| these as a side business since there seems to be quite a
| bit of scratch to be made.
| 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.
| cyclotron3k wrote:
| I would advise the author to just buy the scanner, use it to scan
| everything, then sell it on. If you make a loss on resale, just
| consider it the cost of renting a very high quality scanner, but
| of course there's a significant chance you'll make a profit.
| abakker wrote:
| this is good advice. I've done it with everything from weird
| machine tools (tool and cutter grinder) to woodworking tools to
| snowboards to guitars. if you don't treat big purchases as
| permanent, you'd be amazed at what money you can make and what
| items you can use and enjoy for just the opportunity cost of
| your capital.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I have a friend who buys lots of used stuff, and sells it the
| moment he stops using it.
|
| He's extremely patient and waits for a good deal, and usually
| makes money on the resale.
|
| It lets him go quite deep into a niche hobby without breaking
| the bank, then when he inevitably gets bored and picks up
| another hobby it's not a waste.
| disillusioned wrote:
| It's honestly hard for me to sometimes wire my brain to
| think of total cost of ownership as taking into account the
| fact that durable goods can really maintain their value. I
| feel like I've been so conditioned to either hoard things,
| or worse, just think that they have no resale value from
| having been purchased once, and that's simply not true.
|
| When you remember that there are decent ways to resell
| things, and that plenty of classes of hobbyist goods and
| professional tools maintain their value extremely well, it
| really changes the entire equation.
| MandieD wrote:
| Getting into amateur radio had had me do this re-think.
| The Icom IC-7300 has apparently been the best-selling HF
| transceiver for several years now (think Toyota Corolla
| for relative cost and performance), but even so, numbers
| in the low tens of thousands of units sold since it was
| introduced. They're 1200-1300 EUR new, and 800-900 EUR
| several years used. the other models are even more niche.
|
| It is so common for amateur radio enthusiasts to re-sell
| (and re-re-sell) gear that swap meets are still a central
| activity of their meetings and conventions.
| Maxburn wrote:
| In most cases yes, but the author said this one was showing
| signs of the firewire port failing. If it dies in your hands
| that really sucks financially.
| feet wrote:
| Hardware is repairable, difficulty depends on the mode of
| failure but if the port itself is faulty that's a pretty easy
| fix most of the time as long as you can get your hands on a
| suitable replacement which are (usually) pretty cheap
| Maxburn wrote:
| Also covered in the article, didn't sound cheap.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| He also wrote an article about his first scan on PetaPixel from
| 2017: https://petapixel.com/2017/05/01/16000-photo-scanner-
| vs-500-...
| 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.
| hbossy wrote:
| It could be Firewire controller chip getting probed by software
| for kind of MAC or ID for authentication and licensing.
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| That's sounds even more devilish than keeping an obsolete app
| closed source.
| valleyer wrote:
| Does userland driver software, which probably wants to make all
| sorts of weird syscalls to communicate with hardware, tend to
| actually work under Wine?
| fooker wrote:
| It doesn't work, as far as I know, other than a specific
| category of WiFi drivers.
| stuaxo wrote:
| "It depends" there was definitely work to around scanners in
| Wine, there was SANE/TWAIN bridge at some point.
|
| It's also work checking out SANE itself and seeing if anyone
| got the scanner working in Linux natively.
| msandford wrote:
| I'll second this. I bought some ridiculous behemoth of a
| Fujitsu scanner that could do 60ppm 20 years ago when it
| was manufactured and got it working under SANE in Linux. I
| reported a bug that they fixed to make it work (it didn't
| initially) I think because it had really old firmware
| they'd never seen before.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I'd suggest running Windows in a VM since USB passthrough is
| pretty dependable in that scenario. Presumably Firewire has
| similar transparency.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| People have done it with vmware ESXi and passthrough. But
| you can't do it with say, Virtualbox. So with Firewire,
| real OS on the metal is usually the answer.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| FireWire is a fundamentally different protocol, in that it
| has direct memory access. You have to treat it more like
| PCI than USB.
| somehnguy wrote:
| Heck, I'll do it for the low cost of $1000, save 2 grand!
| Fixing a broken connector is trivial if you've done any
| soldering work.
| extropy wrote:
| I suspect the part that is failing is not the connector
| itself, but rather a controller chip somewhere upstream.
|
| Given the skills you could def DIY repair it for cheaper, the
| high price is likely including uncertainty of what's broken
| and some form of warranty.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I thought it was interesting how in the crop comparison, the
| effective low pass filtering on the worse scan makes it look
| better to my eyes.
|
| Don't get me wrong, the better scan is still much better. The
| correct way if you want to go for that effect is to get the
| better scan and then explicitly apply whatever low pass filtering
| you want, not to low pass filter with a less detailed scan. But I
| thought it was a neat demonstration. Like squinting your eyes.
| bscphil wrote:
| > low pass filtering
|
| The grain baked into the negative is widely considered a
| visually desirable property of shooting with these high end
| analog cameras.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Yeah, and I also have to say that my "looks better" likely
| only applies to seeing a small part of the image magnified to
| an intense amount, not when viewing the image the part comes
| from itself.
|
| Still, I thought it was a neat demonstration, that's all. I
| see "more" on the right side: The weird patterns in the
| windows become actual reflections (as they are), and the
| building gains more 3-dimensionality (a part of it is
| obviously recessed).
| smeagull wrote:
| I wonder how well taking multiple scans of the consumer grade
| quality and using them to denoise a better quality image would
| work.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Thank you for this post.
|
| I'm helping my dad with a SciTex scanner - I think it's a SciTex
| EverSmart Supreme? It's a similar proposition in many ways as far
| as I know. High-end professional equipment from the golden age of
| digital prepress. Firewire is involved. Will essentially only run
| on old Macs. With the SciTex scanners I believe a PowerPC Mac is
| a requirement in practice.
|
| From reading the post, the biggest issue with these Hasselblad
| scanners is of course the scanner mainboard, and I assume the
| same is true of the Scitexes.
|
| A smaller problem is needing to have old Macs around. Regarding
| that, I am now curious if SCSI/Firewire controller passthrough
| into a VM can help. In the same way that recent PC hardware can
| pass a PCI-Express GPU into a virtualized macOS guest. MacOS VMs
| in qemu-kvm on recent Linux kernels running on IOMMU-enabled
| hardware affords a lot of control and compatibility - the guest
| OS gets direct control of a physical PCI-Express device, and it
| works.
|
| Doesn't solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of
| course. And doesn't _completely_ solve the old-mac-hardware
| problem on the other side either. But it might reduce the
| hardware dependency on the Mac side into just a SCSI or Firewire
| controller card instead of a whole old Mac.
|
| Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to
| give any hints about it?
|
| And/or can I be useful in any way? Have set up macOS VMs with
| physical GPU passthrough and have working prepress experience
| with Macs ranging back to a Macintosh Plus :)
|
| The post as it is is already immensely valuable insight into the
| whole ancient-prehistoric-digital-prepress world my father and I
| sometimes burrow a little into - many thanks!
| bxs24p wrote:
| You are actually on the money. We do this at my company. With
| much more challenging scanners than the Flextight. We've
| virtualised the Fujifilm SP3000 this was as well the the
| Noritsu S-1700 (which is a rarer precursor to the HS-1800 with
| very similar specs).
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Cool! No small feat.
|
| Exactly the kind of thing where I'm glad to know people can
| purchase the expertise somewhere in the form of a working
| solution.
| 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
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I canon believe you've done this
| yetihehe wrote:
| This is the zenith of all puns.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i so want to follow up with scheduler pun around summicron-c,
| but i got nothing. i know it's there though.
|
| *summicron being a line of leica lenses. really really nice
| lenses
| jonas-w wrote:
| > "can be a real hassel"
|
| haha, i see what you did there
| flipthefrog wrote:
| A C>oolScan V is worth a fair amount of money already, and will
| only increase in price. Send it to Frank Philips, who repairs
| CoolScans more or less full time. You can find him on the
| FaceBook CoolScan group
| derwiki wrote:
| Maintaining high end medium format cameras is really not bad at
| all -- most are very simple and many have no electronics, so as
| long as the shutter mechanism continues to work, everything
| else is a piece of cake.
| ckemere wrote:
| Seems like a microscope with a motorized stage could do this
| pretty easily?
| sys32768 wrote:
| I spent months scanning about 2500 family negatives and slides on
| an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner.
|
| While it's no FlexTight, I am happy with the results, especially
| because I had no plans to crop.
|
| In hindsight, I wished I had used SilverFast rather than the
| Epson scanning software. SilverFast offers Multi-Exposure which
| does two scans for maximum dynamic range and then merges them
| into one.
|
| Also, the Epson default film holders have no ability to flatten
| the film strips so I probably ended up with softer images in many
| cases. I believe there are 3rd party adapters that address this.
| tlavoie wrote:
| I have the same scanner. Would you mind sharing your setup?
| I've only used mine for flat-bed document scanning, but do have
| a bunch of old family slides.
| codpiece wrote:
| Do you have the illuminated back? If so, your cover is maybe
| 4" (10cm) thick.
|
| I have the v750 and scan medium and large format film with
| excellent results. You can buy Viewscan software from
| https://www.hamrick.com, made by a NASA JPL engineer, if I
| remember correctly.
|
| You get a perpetual license (I reinstalled after 12 years and
| the updated software ran on my old license code). The
| software can pull detail out of even the worst negative. I
| cannot recommend this highly enough! I do have SilverFast as
| well, and have tried the Mac-native scanning, but Viewscan is
| the best.
|
| If you have slides and you haven't kept the original film
| adapters, you can find them on ebay or even Amazon. They are
| simple plastic holders, nothing special.
|
| You can usually select a particular film type if you scan
| color negatives that will automatically color correct for the
| film quirks. All in all, a very easy process once you get set
| up.
|
| Hope this helps!
| nvllsvm wrote:
| You're lucky that you have a perpetual license. They
| recently switched to only one year of updates.
| tlavoie wrote:
| I'm flabbergasted, yeah, it does seem to have the
| illuminated back. I never looked far enough to see that the
| mat covering the inside of the lid was removable. I don't
| recall film holders at all, but will definitely have to
| look into getting some.
|
| I bought this thing when we moved, to get set up ASAP for a
| remote home office, so documents and some photos have
| always been the purpose. I had taken the slides in a box to
| a photo place, where they used some setup with a DSLR to
| get JPEGs, but now I'll need to dig the box back out.
| Thanks!
| jwr wrote:
| I also use an Epson Perfection (V750 Photo). These machines
| produce very good results if you are careful with film
| positioning. I still haven't figured out a way to scan really
| old negatives in rolls: despite buying several magic holders,
| I've yet to find one that can oppose the force of a nearly
| 80-year old film roll.
|
| I would not recommend third-party software, though. The problem
| with scanner software is that every developer seems to think
| that I have unlimited time to tweak the settings for every
| scan, and that scanning those 5 negatives is my only job for
| the next month. That might be the case for some people, but
| trust me, if you're looking at several thousand scans, you do
| not want to tweak each one individually. You want software that
| works with you. And so far every third party program I tried
| did not have this approach.
| codpiece wrote:
| The old-school way to scan film is to lay the film directly on
| glass with a thin layer of mineral oil. Works terrific for
| medium and large format. We used to do this for drum scanners.
|
| https://www.analogfilm.camera/scanning/deciding-when-to-wet-...
| fmajid wrote:
| The V600 is better than most and has a CCD sensor instead of an
| inferior CIS, but the limiting factor is the optics. The
| V700/V750/V800/V850 have proper lenses.
| cbmuser wrote:
| VueScan is usually able to handle old scanners with recent
| operating systems.
|
| Definitely worth the investment!
| kristianpaul wrote:
| I almost bought a WebCam then i recall GoPro's can work that way
| too.
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It might work for B&W but color would be a nightmare.
| jojobas wrote:
| Better yet, a light table, a macro lens and a modern digital
| camera.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > 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. .... I went through several weeks of
| debugging to eventually conclude the port or main board was bad
| and was this not prepared to drop 5,000 Euros on it
|
| So I don't know the author's own personal financial situation,
| but for me given the options 'E5000 plus weeks of effort and
| uncertain results' or 'E8000 and some legwork to find someone to
| do the work' or 'E11000 and some annoyances to have the
| manufacturer do it' I don't think I would have made the same
| choice.
| brudgers wrote:
| YAGNI.
|
| _probably in the region of 75 to 200 frames._
|
| That's a lot of images for a fine art photography book.
| Particularly if the images are 60cm on the short side...and at
| full bleed and through the gutter a book would be about 80cm
| wide.
|
| It is also a lot for a gallery show at that size -- at about
| 1600mm x 600mm, 75 images would cover the floor of a one bedroom
| apartment...two hundred would cover a the floor of a spacious
| three bedroom house.
|
| An editor might be a good way to reduce cost of the goal is a
| book. And no agent would want an artist to release dozens of
| images at once.
| munhitsu wrote:
| I'm a very happy user of Epson V850 Pro. It does scan negatives
| at 6400dpi. Costs fraction of X1 price and works with the latest
| MacOS on M1 device.
|
| PS: It helps when you use it with 3rd party drivers - VueScan.
| ykl wrote:
| Wow, the last comparison between the Hasselblad scanner and a
| consumer scanner is astounding!
| imiric wrote:
| I wonder what kind of results modern upscaling software could
| achieve with that less detailed scan. I've seen much more
| impressive improvements than what it would take in this case,
| and I reckon the end result could look even better than the
| Hasselblad scan.
|
| I'm sure film purists would scoff at this, but there's a large
| market that would prefer cheaper solutions that do this in
| software. We're already used to these enhancements in modern
| cameras, so why not scanners?
| anyfoo wrote:
| That's just making up stuff, though. I don't think only "film
| purists" scoff at this. Anything that even remotely has the
| chance to be used for archival purposes must not be upscaled
| that way. Not only do you effectively fill in details that
| simply aren't there, you also don't even have any foolproof
| way to know which details are made up by upscaling. Worse,
| some super fancy upscaling might falsify parts of the image
| that are still above the threshold of where you would need
| upscaling.
|
| Imagine a historian going through old photos (potentially
| ones that were previously deemed uninteresting, even) and is
| led astray by made up details. Imagine a criminal
| investigation doing the same.
|
| In short, unless you have very specific purposes in mind, and
| always be careful to clearly mark upscaled images as such and
| to keep the originals, upscaling film photos that way is a
| terrible idea.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Before anyone asks, I do think there is _some_ value to
| upscaling of old photos and videos, like the popular HD /4k
| 60fps upscaling of videos from the 1800s: It gives even
| casual viewers a better sense of what the actual scene, and
| the life depicted within, might have been at that period.
| It's easier to accept this as "more real" (even though it's
| ironically less real).
|
| But I really wish any such upscaling was very clearly
| marked as such, and pointed out to even casual viewers with
| disclaimers: Unlike the old choppy, blurry, low-res video,
| this is not a _sample_ of reality back then anymore, but a
| speculative reconstruction.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| To be fair upscaling with videos isn't necessarily making
| information up, but depending on the method used may use
| information from other frames, wich I think isn't the
| same as speculative reconstruction for photos. For
| increasing the frame rate for videos this depends on the
| model used, but in general most of them don't add any new
| information, but instead calculate how something looked
| in-between two frames. https://medium.com/axinc-ai/flavr-
| a-machine-learning-model-t...
| anyfoo wrote:
| Definitely! I was explicitly talking about things like
| "AI upscaling". Not simple interpolation (which keeps the
| image spectrum the same and is effectively just anti-
| aliasing), for example.
|
| To be honest though, the method you linked does seem to
| fall in the bucket I am warning against: It does make
| information up, it does add that made up information.
| Those frames in between are not simply interpolated, or
| you would not need an ML model.
|
| Case in point, individual droplets in that example
| animation may not have existed in reality, or moved the
| way they did here. But hopefully that's fixed by just
| dropping the interpolated frames, at least.
| imiric wrote:
| > That's just making up stuff, though.
|
| It's taking the next step in line with what all digital
| cameras already do. They all do post-processing and make
| approximations to what the eye actually sees. Just because
| upscaling technology is still in its infancy and it's not
| entirely foolproof yet, is not an indication that it won't
| become seamless and undetectable in the future.
|
| I agree that such features should be optional and all
| processing should be clearly marked, but to dismiss the
| technology altogether is a mistake.
| [deleted]
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Those upscalers never looks remotely correct to the trained
| eye beyond minor scaling increases, even with state of the
| art (I work in post production).
| elzbardico wrote:
| What really impressed me was the crop. it is a tiny, tiny part
| of the image above.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I only scanned films a few times, but I didn't remember a
| consumer one (Epson V600) being this poor. But again, it has
| been years.
| bscphil wrote:
| Yep, it really makes me curious what the best DPI you can get
| on a consumer negative scanner is. It's pretty obvious from
| that comparison that it's a low-dpi scan upscaled to the same
| size for the sake of comparing them. But surely there are a few
| high end models that can do reasonable looking 3200 or 6400 DPI
| scans?
| peaslock wrote:
| Can DRIZZLE help to achieve higher resolution? Though with
| hundreds of photos this will imply a lot of work:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(image_processing)
| 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.
| jojobas wrote:
| Sounds like oxygen-free copper directional speaker cables.
| LegitShady wrote:
| It's not that at all.
|
| The camera is an optical device that along with hasselblad
| lenses has (many) detectable differences in the pictures
| taken, along with film choice. Someone shooting with a
| particular camera aiming for large prints is aiming for
| high excellence not serviceability.
|
| there are bad cables (shielding etc) but the
| camera+lens+film is literally a sensor/recording device and
| not really comparable. Whether you like the thing they're
| doing is a separate consideration, but the person in the
| article is not looking for ok or even good results. They
| want everything the best it can be.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Scanning is almost always the weakest link when it comes to
| film photography these days and sometimes it's really bad,
| it's not a "copper vs gold plated cable" scenario, more
| like a "20$ logitech speakers vs "$2000 semi pro setup" to
| listen to .flac scenario
| pkd wrote:
| I mean, yes, I did qualify that I don't want the same
| fidelity from my scans but I also shoot on a Bronica SQ,
| which is no Hasselblad but was still professional equipment
| when it was released and is still extremely well respected
| and gives me great results.
|
| Prints are also extremely forgiving, especially viewed from a
| normal viewing distance, from personal experience of having
| made high quality prints of my photos.
|
| But again, you can choose to spend however much you wish to
| to get the last bit of detail out of things.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| I worked in a multimedia lab that had one. Great scanner but
| god help you if you turned off the automatic dust removal.
| pimlottc wrote:
| It's not clear from this post which was better, the Nikon or
| the Hasselblad?
| beezle wrote:
| I think the Nikon was 4000 dpi so imagine he means
| Hasselblad
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The X1 was probably better, as it was a [almost] drum
| scanner.
|
| But scanner tech seems to have basically "hit a wall," in
| the last decade, or so. Not many advancements in the
| imaging. I think digicams and pure digital images/documents
| have made it difficult to justify the cost of developing
| them.
| buildbot wrote:
| The Hasselblad. They are considered to be as close to drum
| scans as scanners can get.
| fmajid wrote:
| The Flextight is definitely better than the CoolScan, but
| not approaching drum scan quality. A very good CCD
| scanner with a great enlarger-quality lens, and the
| transport is very good at keeping the film flat along the
| line scanned by the CCD, by the expedient of bending it
| cylindrically, but it's not the same dynamic range as the
| photomultipler tube on a drum scanner, or even what the
| old $50K prepress X-Y flatbed scanners like a Creo Scitex
| or Fuji Lanovia could do.
| buildbot wrote:
| Oh I know/agree. It is literally described as a virtual
| drum scanner by B&H for example though, as inaccurate as
| that is. To me the main difference is CCD vs.
| photomultipler.
| keithbingman wrote:
| Sorry, yeah I meant the Hasselblad. The Imacon we had was
| quite old, but it was an amazing scanner.
| fmajid wrote:
| VueScan did not support Digital ICE4, which was the only way
| to scan Kodachromes with automatic dust removal using the
| infrared channel (Kodachrome is opaque to the infrared LED
| used on the Coolscan V ED or 5000 ED). Only Nikon Scan did,
| and possibly SilverFast (Digital ICE was invented by Applied
| Science Fiction, a subsidiary of Kodak).
| [deleted]
| therein wrote:
| I was looking for someone to mention VueScan. Wasn't it built
| for exactly this issue with scanners?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > That's 2500 to 7500.- CHF worth of scans if I get a third party
| to do it.
|
| This is how I ended up with my first laser printer.
|
| My aunt was asked to publish a limited edition of a book she
| translated to German. The printer wanted a ~1000 dpi film and we
| got quotes on how much it'd cost to get the protolith done. We
| then concluded a good laser printer that could print on
| transparencies would be far cheaper and fit our budget, so we
| asked if that would work for the printer. When they said it
| would, we got the printer, I tweaked the halftoning a bit and off
| we went.
|
| In the end, the German translation we did was perceivably better
| quality than the professionally typeset Portuguese version. And I
| got a nice laser printer.
| m463 wrote:
| It can be a lot of fun when you go down the (impractical) path
| that way...
|
| Get someone to do it, or DIY but get a cool tool out of it?
|
| That's how you end up with things like film scanners, or pole
| saws, or portable battery-powered staple guns for electric
| wiring.
|
| Just try not to have a cool tool + procrastination.
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| Last sentence hit close to home. It's valid for me about
| anything.
| moremore221 wrote:
| I know a few students who bought those big business lasers and
| 3rd party toner to print pirated textbooks. This was before
| good tablets with stylus support were commonplace. Several
| books would already pay for the machine.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I came very close to buying one of those large car-sized
| print systems. I thought about it because a graphics shop was
| upgrading and the printer's brains were very close to a
| Dandelion or Daybreak Xerox workstation (same UI elements,
| similar boot sequence, same keyboard and mouse), but, after a
| closer look, it seemed to be impossible to extricate the
| brain from the rest of the body and, so, the whole machine
| went to someone who'd love it, cherish it, and print with it
| (instead of me, who'd kill it, sell the organs and keep the
| brain alive in a jar).
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Licenses and driver source codes are assets that costed them
| money and are still valuable, that's their reasoning, I guess.
|
| We (society) could ask them nicely to sell this stuff, and then
| raise money and buy them.
|
| Nobody demands you to give out the stuff that you don't use for
| free, why should we demand it from a company?
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| >Nobody demands you to give out the stuff that you don't use
| for free, why should we demand it from a company?
|
| The two aren't comparable. IP is not the equivalent of physical
| objects.
|
| A better way to reframe it is that the company is effectively
| keeping ideas hostage.
|
| They aren't doing anything with them, but are preventing anyone
| else from making something as good to do the same job, for no
| good reason.
|
| >Nobody demands you to give out the stuff that you don't use
| for free
|
| People are demanded to give up land for the public good. It's
| "eminent domain" in the US, but called different things
| elsewhere. Compulsory Purchase Order in the UK.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| They paid, say, $10 million to make it, and now it's theirs.
| If you want it so badly - buy it. If public is not willing to
| pay a small fraction of this, like $100, then public doesn't
| need it.
| fmajid wrote:
| I had a Nikon Super Coolscan 9000ED that I ended up selling off
| and still have my CoolScan 5000ED with the slide and strip film
| autofeeder when I finally get around to scanning my father's old
| slides and negatives in my copious spare time(tm). The 9000 could
| scan a X-Pan slide in a single pass, the 5000ED in two scans with
| stitching. I had dedicated a first-generation MacBook Pro to run
| the software as they had a FireWire port, using BootCamp to run
| Windows on it as the Windows version of Nikon Scan was more
| stable.
|
| Almost all the proper film scanners were discontinued around
| 2010, that the Flextight series survived another decade is
| amazing, but Imacon bought Hasselblad (not the other way around)
| and now DJI has bought the combined entity, and obviously has no
| interest in the legacy of film.
| detaro wrote:
| So someone needs to get the idea into their heads that lugging
| medium-format cameras around would be the perfect excuse why
| people need to buy larger and more expensive drones
| fmajid wrote:
| Well, the post-war Hasselblad medium format system started as
| an aerial reconnaissance photo system, as did lenses like the
| legendary 38mm Zeiss Biogon in the SWC.
| robga wrote:
| Brought back "Fond" memories of my Polaroid Sprintscan 120
| (4000dpi) [0] which could handle negs of up to 6x9 size. It was a
| slow, noisy beast, but gave great scans.
|
| Around the turn of the century I used it thousands of 120 film
| (6x6cm) negatives shot from my beautiful 1980s Plaubel Makina 67.
|
| I've often thought of resuscitating the camera from its pelican
| box sarcophagus but the idea of scanning the negatives gives me
| chills.
|
| [0] http://www.photographyreview.com/product/digital-
| gear/scanne...
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| If anyone is curious where the (stunning) photo is from, it's
| Leysin in Switzerland.
| slipperyp wrote:
| Kinda wish there were more details on this page to understand or
| interpret what the author is talking about or compared it to.
|
| I have a Canon 9000F (consumer grade) that is getting very old
| now and often difficult to get running when I pull it out, but it
| scans film at 2400dpi which has been adequate for my home
| archival purposes. I don't know if this is in the ballpark of
| what the author used as the comparison for the consumer scanner
| (nor is the DPI cited). About 8 years ago I was going to start a
| new film scanning project and thought "Hey, maybe now's the time
| to buy an updated film scanner" but I learned there is very
| little on the consumer market and it's gotten very expensive.
|
| I think the 9000f hasn't been made in a while but I still find it
| to be a great scanner when I need this.
| gsich wrote:
| Real resolution is probably around ~1200dpi.
| fencepost wrote:
| There are a couple of sample zooms at the very end of the page
| comparing an X1 (6300dpi) to the best the author could get on a
| consumer scanner (unspecified dpi, but fuzzy). The range given
| is 6300dpi-8000dpi for the scanners the author's talking about.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| waffletower wrote:
| "Absolutely no contest, and there's no way I can interpolate the
| consumer scan up to achieve files good enough to print 160x60cm.
| I need high quality scans of these negatives."
|
| I have a strong sense that the original author has not tried any
| of these upscaling techniques:
|
| https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-super-resolution-on-se...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I'm surprised FireWire port repair is that difficult/expensive.
| Can't be that much to it, you just need to source the
| same/similar controller from another (much cheaper!) device, no?
| thekombustor wrote:
| I'd imagine more of it has to do with trying to beat every
| penny of those desperate to get more use of their $15k+
| scanner, and less to do with it being a technically complex
| task. That's assuming it truly just being a port issue is
| correct.
|
| It's a niche market, and they're just taking advantage of such
| niche market, however morally gray it may be.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think the suggestion was more, why doesn't the blogger
| undertake this repair himself if he's getting such a great
| deal on a rare item?
| kelnos wrote:
| I doubt you'd even need to get a new controller. If the wording
| in the article about what breaks -- just the port itself -- is
| accurate, the ports themselves cost a few bucks on a site like
| DigiKey, and even if you have no experience soldering, you
| could fix it, working very slowly, carefully, and methodically,
| over a few hours. (Someone with experience could do it much
| faster, of course).
|
| Sure, I get that you might be squeamish about opening up a
| $16,000 device yourself and taking a soldering iron to it, but
| a port/connector is about as low risk as it gets when you need
| to repair electronics.
|
| If you don't have a decent soldering iron or any of the related
| accessories, this "$3k" repair will cost under $100. If you do
| have one, it will cost you under $10.
| II2II wrote:
| I wouldn't suggest a simple fix on an expensive device as a
| first soldering project. It is not that you need much
| experience, but it is risky and a little experience removes
| virtually all of the risk. Either practice on a few throw
| away boards with a similar part first, or ask someone you
| know who has relevant experience to do it for you.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I've had mixed results -- occasionally lifting traces/pads.
| Does that mean my iron is too hot? Seems like some boards
| are more delicate than others.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I was being charitable and assuming absolute worst case
| scenario. But I agree.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Another fun thing (that I or someone I know might have
| done) is when you do a great job replacing the port with an
| exact replica but in the process somehow manage to desolder
| a resistor that's about the size of a small shard of a
| grain of rice from the board AND simultaneously knock the
| board so that the resistor goes flying into your carpet so
| now even though everything else is good the system won't
| work because you don't have the tools or know-how to locate
| a replacement.
| yc-kraln wrote:
| So, it's probably not the phyiscal port, but the controller
| and/or the interfacing. If you read the article fully, it
| mentions that the only known way to really fix the issue is to
| completely replace the main board... which would tell me that
| the "firewire port breaks" is a red-herring and something
| deeper in the electronics fails over time.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I wonder would kind of PPI you could get by mounting a new iPhone
| at the sweet-spot focal distance, inside a properly-lighted box?
| xuhu wrote:
| ...and would there be any distortion in the result ? If this
| works, it should also work for printing sewing patterns which
| are a pain to copy by hand.
| jeffbee wrote:
| An iPhone can't focus any closer than several centimeters away.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The macro lens on the 13 and up focuses best at about 1.5 cm
| but it seems to have issues with being out of focus in the
| corners.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's called field curvature and even modern macro lenses
| show some of that.
|
| You need a lens that's designed to reproduce flat subjects
| to get something decent:
| https://www.closeuphotography.com/lens-tests
| iamtedd wrote:
| Depends, can you turn off the post-processing?
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think a second hand digital camera would be cheaper and
| easier to use, as well as better quality.
|
| Maybe worth a 3D printed holder like this.
|
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3645894
| fauxreb wrote:
| I worked for years for a professional photographer with a vast
| commercial archive.
|
| After every finished project we would copy the files to a thumb
| drive and _print_ the top 10-20 images at around 14 " long edge
| >300dpi and place everything in a simple archival box.
|
| The logic being that even if the digital copy becomes
| unsustainable because of interface change or degrading, you could
| still scan or photograph the prints.
|
| Most analog prints you see 'digitized' on Instagram are iPhone
| photographs of prints laid flat. It's all a bit ridiculous.
| szszrk wrote:
| Paper will last, a 100 or so years is not that hard to achieve,
| honestly. A bank I worked for had documents dating 140 years
| and they were just in a box most of the time. They handled it
| carefully, kept proper moisture in the room, but that was
| mostly it.
|
| What about the original photo film? Isn't that the ultimate
| backup in such situation? There will be an option of
| potentially scanning it with better equipment or skill in
| future. Like it's done nowadays firm classic analogue movies.
|
| I've recently read a great story of a son of a local artist who
| found a box of photographic film left behind his relative 80
| years ago and it was "relatively well preserved, just sitting
| there in a box".
|
| This reminds me: please let me know if you found a tape backup
| solution that is feasible for a small homelab!
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Paper will last, a 100 or so years
|
| afaik even the best color papers (for wet prints) will last
| 20-50 years before starting to show color shift, that's in a
| darkbox with optimal humidity. b&w obviously is much better
|
| Modern pigment prints seem to perform a bit better, 65-120
| years according to some studies
| szszrk wrote:
| Haven't taken into account that article talks about actual
| photography and arts, not written or printed text... That
| is a different story.
| jdfellow wrote:
| Color film and photo paper is made with dyes that fade and
| shift over time. An inkjet print with pigments will last
| longer. Only monochrome silver metal film or paper will last
| indefinitely, and it's the gelatin layer that will last, some
| substrates including consumer-grade acetate film and most
| papers will degrade. The best archival format is silver on
| polyester film. Color can still be achieved by way of three
| exposures in RGB, similar to Technicolor.
| bxs24p wrote:
| You can easily run most Flextight scanners on windows 10. I think
| you just need to install two version of Flexcolor. I have
| extensive experience in dealing with old scanners as this is
| actually my line of work. In our company we have almost over 20
| scanners of certain types from various brands: Flextight,
| Noritsu, and primarily Fuji. We use a lot of KVM virtualisation
| using linux to passthrough PCI cards to VMs.
| non-nil wrote:
| I would be interested in hearing more about your experiences
| running these and possibly some notes how they compare
| regarding scan quality etc. Do you primarily scan 35 mm?
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Almost all sounds like exaggeration, Intel&AMD have done a
| lot, and even ARM vendors have contributed lot of drivers.
| See for example LWN author stats for employers, plenty of HW
| vendors there: https://lwn.net/Articles/902854/
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| In this case I don't think it would really matter. An MIT-
| licensed driver/app to run this scanner would be perfectly
| acceptable and useful to the community.
|
| Copyleft just ensures that other parties can't take someone's
| open-source work and close it up and profit off of it. I
| don't think copyleft is really necessary for when a
| corporation open-sources some software essential to the use
| of one of their products.
| jchw wrote:
| Software freedom didn't really disappear from public
| discourse, it never appeared in the first place, unless you
| count amongst a bunch of nerds nobody in the real world cares
| about or listens to. It may sound harsh, but that's reality.
|
| Open source _appeared_ in the public discourse because it had
| tangible benefits and people could understand what it meant.
|
| I don't think open source killed the concept of software
| freedom, I think the concept of software freedom as a concept
| literally never caught on to begin with.
|
| Honestly, I'm a bit tired of the Stallman worship at this
| point. A lot of people were pessimistic about the future of
| software and the internet, and they're not all prophets. He
| observed what was happening when other people chose to
| naively ignore it and hope for the best, and that's not
| nothing, but frankly, if he was so smart, then you'd think
| he'd have a _solution_. Nonetheless, it seems like everything
| Stallman actually proposes is impractical and out-of-touch
| with the current state-of-affairs, which makes me wonder what
| we 're supposed to do other than marvel at the fact that
| someone was able to reason that this would become an issue
| some day.
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Why?
| BuckyBeaver wrote:
| Yes, down-mod instead of answer.
|
| Go back to Reddit.
| 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
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem is in messaging. The whole point of the OSI was
| that the FSF was too ideological to be appealing to most
| businesses. The problem, is that the ideological angle _is
| the point_. The OSI would have never pitched the GPL, and
| the FSF would have never pitched the MIT license.
|
| When you release software under a license that makes
| approximately zero demands of the other party, the other
| party won't respect your software. When you release
| software under a license that makes even low effort demands
| of the user, like reciprocation, they will.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The MIT license is a FSF certified "Free Software"
| license, it provides all of the "Essential Freedoms". The
| MIT is not "copyleft" like GPL is but copyleft is not the
| same thing as free software.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Once again, that's not the point. The ideology required
| to promote copyleft licenses at all is the point. The
| OSI's standpoint is that you _can_ distribute software
| that provides the user with their freedom. The FSF 's
| standpoint is that you _are ethically obligated to_.
| kaoD wrote:
| That's a great comment to prove my point on how software
| freedom is completely absent from public discourse :)
|
| I'll let Stallman speak for me:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point....
| Gigachad wrote:
| Stallman made up his own definition of open source which
| is different than the common definition. The OSI best
| sums it up here https://opensource.org/osd their
| definition is essentially the same as the FSF essential
| freedoms. Without classifying "Stallman's definition of
| Open Source" people will assume something much like the
| OSI one.
|
| What Stallman calls Open Source is what the rest of the
| world calls Source Available. Stallman shows his lack of
| communication skills again here by endlessly fighting to
| redefine words for no purpose.
| kaoD wrote:
| > What Stallman calls Open Source is what the rest of the
| world calls Source Available
|
| That's absolutely wrong, as clearly explained in the
| article I linked to.
| jujube3 wrote:
| Stallman appears to be considering "source available"
| licenses which forbid modification (and sometimes
| deployment) as "open source." This is not the definition
| of open source that everyone else uses. Certainly the OSI
| would not agree. There is more information here:
| https://opensource.org/osd
|
| RMS was around in the 1980s when "open source" was still
| being defined. So maybe he thinks he can define it
| however he likes. But to the rest of us it doesn't make
| sense, like saying "software that has a free software
| license, like GNU Emacs and Microsoft Word." One of those
| two doesn't belong in that sentence, and saying that I'm
| using my own custom definition of "free software" is a
| pretty shitty way to argue.
| neilv wrote:
| Please consider not calling it "free software". I've tried to
| explain to RMS that it's terrible communication, but I think
| he likes the wordplay.
|
| The term "free" product already meant something to people,
| and continues to mean that.
|
| There is generally _no_ opportunity to (as RMS might imagine)
| say "I'm glad you asked about the name. We mean _free as in
| freedom_. Let me assemble my lecture podium and explain... "
|
| Instead, people who hear the term have been hearing the
| _opposite_ of the intent.
|
| Which leads us back ot the current problem, of people
| thinking it's all random hookups with open source, rather
| than meaningful relationships.
| kaoD wrote:
| I don't think it's a naming problem, I think _libre
| software_ has been under direct attack on a similar angle
| to "embrace, extend and extinguish".
|
| But yeah I agree naming doesn't help. I'm biased because in
| my language libre and gratis are distinct. I'll keep that
| in mind, even though I'm a bit pessimistic and don't think
| it will help, I guess it won't hurt either.
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed that naming isn't the only problem. It's a complex
| environment of different understandings and goals,
| including adversarial dynamics (and sometimes very
| underhanded behavior, including EEE).
|
| I think the foot-dragging by some on the name, after it's
| been pointed out to them, is kinda symptomatic of their
| difficulty operating in this environment. And they often
| end up discrediting action that could be viable, but
| needs to win buy-in from others.
| [deleted]
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Stallman is an odd character. He's deeply passionate about
| the FOSS movement, and its success means more to him than
| anything _except_ his jargon choices. He 'd rather see the
| whole thing burn than change the words he demands it be
| described with.
| dTal wrote:
| That's a bit unfair. He passionately advocates for his
| choice of language _because_ he thinks it 's important to
| the future of free software. You might disagree with him,
| but he's not exactly shy about justifying his opinions.
| lmm wrote:
| Linux is even worse at maintaining compatibility with old
| drivers. Opening your source doesn't help when the OS doesn't
| offer a stable API; you can try to get your driver into the
| kernel tree, but that takes forever, has high code quality
| standards, and can still lead to you getting rejected
| essentially arbitrarily. So you can publish a driver that will
| work on linux version xyz, but that requires udev and systemd
| and glibc and everything else to be of versions that match.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Is high code quality a thing we should not expect out of
| hardware drivers?
| lmm wrote:
| "Should" or not, the reality is it's rare. Rejecting low-
| quality hardware drivers tends to mean ending up with no
| drivers rather than with high-quality ones.
| somat wrote:
| but in linux it does not matter as much, you have the source,
| it is unpleasant to update it to a different api but not
| actually that hard, much easier than when all you have is a
| binary blob that you want to get running on your system.
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| There are less external devices you'd plug in, but internal
| hardware is still a huge battle. Internal laptop webcams
| usually don't work on day one, finger print scanners usually
| don't work, suspend and sleep is big problem for most new
| laptops.
| fernly wrote:
| While this is not one of the 7200 scanners claimed by VueScan[1],
| it might be worth talking to those folks. With their experience
| they might be able to reverse-engineer the protocol.
|
| If not (and I'm sure this is not an acceptable idea to a purist
| like OP) I would consider using a good consumer-grade scanner and
| post-process with Topaz AI[2], which produces absolutely
| astonishing results in my experience. Yes, maybe it is inventing
| the pixels it adds, but they look like the right pixels
| nonetheless.
|
| [1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html
|
| [2] https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai
| cratermoon wrote:
| I have a Nikon Coolscan that I keep running. On Windows there's a
| "compatibility mode" that I think means "pretend you have a
| 32-bit address space" that I need to use to run the drivers.
| ogurechny wrote:
| I wonder whether making multiple scans on a decent and more
| accessible scanner with a small physical shake after each one and
| stacking the images can get you acceptable higher resolution
| results. After all, all smartphones do it today for each photo,
| and the astronomers have been doing it for decades.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I would love to see a hyperresolution stacking scanner that's
| just a piezo buzzer JB Welded to an Epson.
| jll29 wrote:
| +1 for a cool title, and great choice of a camera. I once used a
| friend's Hasselblad in the Scottish highlands, and the photo
| looked almost nicer than reality.
|
| A refusal to share the source code of a driver in the 1970s (on
| the side of Xerox Corp.) angered RMS enough back then to start
| the Free Software Foundation, and the rest is history, after all.
| So let's see what your solution will be...
|
| What you could do is buy the scanner and after your project offer
| others to scan their slides to get some of the money back. Or
| team up with others and split the cost of the scanner upfront
| (this latter scheme requires someone to hold the physical device,
| I think donating it to a library after the project would be a
| fair mechanism, so each party - and others - can still use it
| later).
| pbronez wrote:
| I wonder if the company would be willing to grant a patent
| license to an open hardware version of the scanner. They're not
| manufacturing them anymore, nobody else seems interested in
| making the damn things... let it go.
| tempestn wrote:
| Do modern equivalents of these scanners exist, but they're too
| expensive for the author? Or has the market for such things
| declined to the point where you just can't buy them anymore? (If
| so, why? Everything's just end to end digital now, so nothing to
| scan, I guess?)
| buildbot wrote:
| They do, and get far better, but are far more expensive, like
| another order of magnitude. This is already a 5K scanner!
|
| Also not much advantage to line scans when you can get 150MP
| backs now for copy work.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Feels like the kind of thing you'd be better off renting than
| buying. I wonder if there are any facilities you can buy a
| day pass or something and use expensive gear like this. I
| know there are for woodworking and related hobby gear.
| buildbot wrote:
| There are in larger cities! For example in NYC:
| https://www.nyc-spc.com/lab-rentals
| xvilka wrote:
| > Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and
| refuse to open source it to allow others to do that.
|
| Hasselblad are idiots then.
|
| You could try to find more owners of that hardware and chip up
| together to hire a reverse-engineer to make an open source
| driver. Compared with the cost of hardware and complexity of
| using old computers to interact with it, it should be negligible.
| fauxreb wrote:
| Hasselblad were acquired by the drone manufacturers DJI, and
| things have gone super-digital.
|
| Some great concept digital cameras (and digital mounts), but
| they've probably forgotten how the mirror worked.
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