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I almost bought a scanner

• canbus 4y ago
  I recently got a (35mm/APS) Canon scanner working really well with http://www.sane-project.org/ http://www.sane-project.org/ - not the same as the one mentioned in the article, but a really good collection of open source backends for old film scanners.
• lytfyre 4y ago
  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.
  • astrostl 4y ago
    Alternatively, the state of digital cameras is so good these days that they can be used to digitize film. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pnqF8G_wiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pnqF8G_wiM highlights a setup with a Panasonic G9 that features an 80MP in-camera high resolution mode. A used body can be found as low as $500 in the USA, and it's a camera too!
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I think there are adapters for digicams.
    • omoikane 4y ago
      Nikon has one: https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/a/tips-and-techniques/digitizing-film-using-the-d850-and-es-2-negative-digitizer.html https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/a/tips-and-tec...
    • hotcoffeebear 4y ago
      Here is one from Pentax https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2014/04/21/pentax-film-duplicator-helps-you-scan-35mm-and-medium-format-film-quicker https://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2014/04/21/pentax-film...
  • fetus8 4y ago
    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 https://www.negative.supply/shop-all/basic-film-carrier-35. You need a light table or LED hot light, and a way to hold the camera and you're in business. Personally, I've been scanning my own 35mm negatives for the past few years with both a Full-frame DSLR and an APS-C Mirrorless camera, and get much much better results than I'd been getting via my local film processing lab and their scanning. Scanning negatives with a modern digital camera still retains a lot of the filmic quality that we've come to expect via shooting film. Obviously you lose the "resolution" and ability to blow those images up once scanned, but you can 100% still see the grain, color reproduction, and analog anomalies that we're used to by shooting film.
    • keithbingman 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Heck ya! How are you processing your negatives? Negative Lab Pro? Manually creating positives in Photoshop?
        • keithbingman 4y ago
          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.
        • lm28469 4y ago
          I'd recommend https://grain2pixel.com https://grain2pixel.com. It's free, works good and the creator answered my emails in less than a day
  • jrockway 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      I'd never heard of this. https://petapixel.com/2017/02/14/wet-mount-scanning-get-highest-quality-film-scans-home/ 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?
      • NegativeK 4y ago
        I suspect they're referring to "80% of what I want out of it," not "80% of the detail."
      • codpiece 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        And I wonder if this is the scanning equivalent of wet lithography for making microchips?
  • aplusbi 4y ago
    A friend of mine built a device specifically for using a digital camera to "scan" 35mm film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDWeAbd6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEDWeAbd6J4
  • mmcwilliams 4y ago
    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.
  • BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
      • BuckyBeaver 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          >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 4y ago
  • hotcoffeebear 4y ago
    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.
  • ezconnect 4y ago
    He can even go higher resolution by using microscope.
    • ravenhappy 4y ago
      This is a good point. Speaking of points, in the way a laser turntable pickup is noisier than a needle, would an electron microscope scan of a frame of film be best, or is there a sweet spot where the grain noise is at an optimal minimum?
      • ezconnect 4y ago
        His dream scanner is 8000ppi about 3.175um pixel size. A Canon 5DS 50 megapixel has a pixel size of 4.1 microns.
  • kkukshtel 4y ago
    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!
• pathartl 4y ago
  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/flextight https://pathar.tl/resources/flexcolor 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 4y ago
    You are a blessing. I need a high rez scanning solution and I think you may have solved it for me.
  • deltarholamda 4y ago
    Amazing. Sometimes the Internet disappoints, but sometimes the Internet is fricking awesome. Well done.
    • pathartl 4y ago
      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/resources/flextight https://web.archive.org/web/20230126040120/https://pathar.tl...
• stavros 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    Nearer the end they add that they were "not prepared to drop 5,000 Euros on it"
    • stavros 4y ago
      Ah, I just saw it, thanks.
• aendruk 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    That's a pain. I think SANE/TWAIN bridge is a thing.
• KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > 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.
  • pathartl 4y ago
    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.
  • LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    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...
• georgebcrawford 4y ago
  Your Formula Non photos are incredible. I love the banality of behind-the-scenes to be found at sporting events, especially longer ones.
• elahieh 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I see your blad pun, and I leica it
    • dylan604 4y ago
      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
    • sixstringtheory 4y ago
      I canon believe you’ve done this
      • yetihehe 4y ago
        This is the zenith of all puns.
  • jonas-w 4y ago
    > "can be a real hassel" haha, i see what you did there
  • derwiki 4y ago
    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.
  • flipthefrog 4y ago
    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
• munhitsu 4y ago
  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.
• pkd 4y ago
  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.
  • LegitShady 4y ago
    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.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • jojobas 4y ago
      Sounds like oxygen-free copper directional speaker cables.
      • LegitShady 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  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.html https://www.filmscanner.info/en/NikonSuperCoolscan9000ED.htm... [1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#technical-information https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#...
  • keithbingman 4y ago
    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.
    • pimlottc 4y ago
      It’s not clear from this post which was better, the Nikon or the Hasselblad?
      • beezle 4y ago
        I think the Nikon was 4000 dpi so imagine he means Hasselblad
      • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        The Hasselblad. They are considered to be as close to drum scans as scanners can get.
• neilv 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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/ https://lwn.net/Articles/902854/
• jojobas 4y ago
  That's odd. A sub $1000 Epson scanner with 35mm and 120 film adapters can resolve professional film grain, can't do better then that.
  • whitemary 4y ago
    The epson consumer scanners are good. Really good. But they are nothing like drum scanners and other professional scanners.
    • jojobas 4y ago
      Again, how? Once you get to the grain there's no more information to extract.
      • whitemary 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            It sounds like you haven't done a lot of film scanning besides perhaps an Epson.
      • s800 4y ago
        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.
• t3estabc 4y ago
  [dead]
• StillBored 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • snvzz 4y ago
      >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 4y ago
        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.
• Topgamer7 4y ago
  > 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.
  • valleyer 4y ago
    Does userland driver software, which probably wants to make all sorts of weird syscalls to communicate with hardware, tend to actually work under Wine?
    • loa_in_ 4y ago
      I have so far successfully: used eeprom programmers, flashed a multi of android software, interfaced with a PLC from under wine with no problems or workarounds whatsoever
      • valleyer 4y ago
        Nice. Out of curiosity: all USB?
    • fooker 4y ago
      It doesn't work, as far as I know, other than a specific category of WiFi drivers.
    • stuaxo 4y ago
      "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.
      • 4y ago
• ortusdux 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    It might work for B&W but color would be a nightmare.
  • jojobas 4y ago
    Better yet, a light table, a macro lens and a modern digital camera.
• cratermoon 4y ago
  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.
• tempestn 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        There are in larger cities! For example in NYC: https://www.nyc-spc.com/lab-rentals https://www.nyc-spc.com/lab-rentals
• causality0 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • PishER 4y ago
    Never heard of a 8000 dpi benchmark before. I have to look into it.
  • urbandw311er 4y ago
    Can you link to one?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • causality0 4y ago
      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.
      • flipthefrog 4y ago
        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 https://www.filmscanner.info/en/FilmscannerTestberichte.html for very detailed tests of scanners, including claimed vs real DPI
• groos 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      That’s basically how everyone did internegatives, but with the lights on.
• thenickdude 4y ago
  You ought to be able to run a 32-bit VM and PCIe-passthrough an SCSI or Firewire card to it.
  • moloch-hai 4y ago
    Apparently the real problem is the Firewire hardware in the scanner fails.
• ckemere 4y ago
  Seems like a microscope with a motorized stage could do this pretty easily?
• sys32768 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 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 4y ago
        You're lucky that you have a perpetual license. They recently switched to only one year of updates.
      • 4y ago
• ykl 4y ago
  Wow, the last comparison between the Hasselblad scanner and a consumer scanner is astounding!
  • imiric 4y ago
    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?
    • ancientworldnow 4y ago
      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).
    • anyfoo 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
• unsupp0rted 4y ago
  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?
  • jeffbee 4y ago
    An iPhone can't focus any closer than several centimeters away.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 https://www.closeuphotography.com/lens-tests
  • xuhu 4y ago
    ...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.
  • iamtedd 4y ago
    Depends, can you turn off the post-processing?
  • Symbiote 4y ago
    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 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3645894
• tinus_hn 4y ago
  If you can virtualize the FireWire connection you can probably make this work by running a supported OS in a VM.
• Apocryphon 4y ago
  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.
  • monksy 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • fmajid 4y ago
    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/ https://blog.majid.info/scanner-group-test/
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      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.
• kristianpaul 4y ago
  I almost bought a WebCam then i recall GoPro’s can work that way too.
• rbanffy 4y ago
  > 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.
  • moremore221 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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).
  • m463 4y ago
    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.
    • 4y ago
• fmajid 4y ago
  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™. 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• yread 4y ago
  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-A5J1 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
  • b112 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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/Philips_Hue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.
• dietrichepp 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    If you want to buy new, an Epson V850 is your only real option nowadays.
    • dietrichepp 4y ago
      That’s why I’m looking at used gear—the Epson flatbeds just aren’t nearly good enough.
      • fmajid 4y ago
        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.
        • 4y ago
• robocat 4y ago
  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-engineering/ https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2022/09/04/pakon-reverse-... discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714806
  • fauxreb 4y ago
    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.
• wrldos 4y ago
  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 https://www.scantips.com/g4/p1230510.jpg
• dylan604 4y ago
  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.
  • leejo 4y ago
    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 4y ago
• Zetobal 4y ago
  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-scanning https://www.michaelstricklandimages.com/blog/2018/4/4/drum-s...
  • buildbot 4y ago
    VERY cool! So slow though compared to scanning with a camera, but 700MP...
  • codpiece 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Yep. I set up an alert...
  • maz29 4y ago
    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/id1612354887 https://apps.apple.com/tt/app/auction-watch-ebay-alerts/id16...
• brudgers 4y ago
  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.
• ComputerGuru 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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.
    • ComputerGuru 4y ago
      I was being charitable and assuming absolute worst case scenario. But I agree.
• anyfoo 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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).
• cbmuser 4y ago
  VueScan is usually able to handle old scanners with recent operating systems. Definitely worth the investment!
• fernly 4y ago
  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 https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html [2] https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai
• pmarreck 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• xvilka 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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.
• smeagull 4y ago
  I wonder how well taking multiple scans of the consumer grade quality and using them to denoise a better quality image would work.
• Nimitz14 4y ago
  If anyone is curious where the (stunning) photo is from, it’s Leysin in Switzerland.
• slipperyp 4y ago
  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.
  • fencepost 4y ago
    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.
  • gsich 4y ago
    Real resolution is probably around ~1200dpi.
• jxramos 4y ago
  Interesting device https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/463799-REG/Hasselblad_70380201_Flextight_X1_Scanner.html https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/463799-REG/Hasselblad...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cyclotron3k 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
• waffletower 4y ago
  "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-set5-4x-upscaling https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-super-resolution-on-se...
• exabrial 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• adamredwoods 4y ago
  He also wrote an article about his first scan on PetaPixel from 2017: https://petapixel.com/2017/05/01/16000-photo-scanner-vs-500-scanner/ https://petapixel.com/2017/05/01/16000-photo-scanner-vs-500-...
• kybernetyk 4y ago
  [flagged]
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• totetsu 4y ago
  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.
• ogurechny 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I would love to see a hyperresolution stacking scanner that's just a piezo buzzer JB Welded to an Epson.
• robga 4y ago
  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/scanners/film-scanners/polaroid/sprintscan-120-film-scanner.html http://www.photographyreview.com/product/digital-gear/scanne...
• nicoburns 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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).
• fauxreb 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
        Haven't taken into account that article talks about actual photography and arts, not written or printed text... That is a different story.
    • jdfellow 4y ago
• XantosD 4y ago
  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.
• AnthonBerg 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• peaslock 4y ago
  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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(image_processing)
• jll29 4y ago
  +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 4y ago
    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.
• gsich 4y ago
  DSLR/M scanning is the way to go.
• sandos 4y ago
  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.
• bxs24p 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
    • bxs24p 4y ago
      Yes we primarily deal with 35mm color rolls, which I'd say accounts for 90% of our business. Though at our scale I wouldn't call the amount of Black and White or Slide we do as insignificant. Generally I'd say the Noritsu Scanners yield the best results for time spent for 35mm/120. I'd say results wise they are 90% there compared to Flextights with the added benefit of having some ICE capabilities (the infrared readout for dust masking). The Noritsu 1800 is probably the best scanner on the market right now though it's price point certainly reflects it. We have about 4 in production. That being said our favourite machine is the Fujifilm SP500 which is a dedicated 35mm Scanner, with superior ICE capabilities to that of the Noritsu though not as sharp but I'd say has about 80% as good as the noritsu though the Fuji do have a nicer colour science. We have about 16 of these guys. The Flextight honestly doesn't get much use because it is far too slow of a workflow. We've had about 3/4 different models throughout the years all SCSI. I haven't used any of the new ones. Though honestly I don't think they are worth the time. The need to cut the negatives to use them alone is prohibitive and makes it more of a tool for special circumstances in our opinion. I have yet to use many drum scanners or the fuji highend flat bed scanner but if someone has any to play around with one I'd like to give em a go.
      • leejo 4y ago
• stackedinserter 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    >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 4y ago
      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.
• bookofjoe 4y ago
  https://mitraprint.com/hasselblad-flextight-x1-scanner https://mitraprint.com/hasselblad-flextight-x1-scanner
• bigbillheck 4y ago
  > 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.