Re: Film Scanner Questions

I use a small drum scanner, a Dainippon Screen, that scans up to 5X7"
transparencies and negs. I bought it used about 12 yrs ago. It wasn't
exactly cheap then, but I've used it thousands of times since. Various
iterations of the machine appear on ebay every so often and usually go for
around one or two thousand dollars.

It gives an excellent scan, 100Mb+ in about 10min; I think its as good as
anything I can get from a service bureau or color separation house
(particularly good at extracting information in dense transparencies) but
there are a few caveats about using an old scanner:

I have to use an old mac quadra 950 running OS 7 because that's the most
recent version of the system that it recognizes. Its slow and scsi is a bit
finicky. Also I have to make OS7 talk to OS10 via ethernet and appletalk,
sometimes a trick. I am nearing the end of the duty-life of many of my hard
disks so that I'm always scouring junked legacy macs for working hard
drives. The good thing is that people usually just give them to you.

I don't use a mineral oil bath so there is a lot of clean-up of the scans
due to tiny scratches in the drum. Its not bad with transparencies but the
thin areas of BW negatives sometimes take over an hour to clean up.

I've basically had to learn how to service this machine myself. Basically
there isn't much to do besides occasionally changing the backlight bulb or
reinstalling the software but I know that if there is a major hardware
breakdown I'll probably have to junk the machine as I can't find anyone who
can do board repairs.

Aside from all that it works fine (I knock on wood), turns out a fine scan
and has saved me thousands of dollars of service bureau fees.

Neal Oshima

On 12/19/05 5:54 AM, "Schuyler Grace" <schuyler@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Thanks, all, for the scanner info. I didn't realize the flatbed film
> scanners actually shine light through the film directly, and it makes sense
> that bouncing light up through the film and back down, again, would result
> in a degraded image. I may still play with it, though, to see if anything
> "artistic" turns up. Since I don't shoot anything smaller than 8x10
> (inches) anymore, I was looking for a cheap way to do big scans and get my
> feet wet in the digital world.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ryuji Suzuki [mailto:rs@silvergrain.org]
> Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2005 12:55 PM
> To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
> Subject: Re: Film Scanner Questions
>
> I think the type of adapter you are talking about is very inexpensive
> type that produces unacceptable results for anyone serious. Film
> adapters for my flatbed are simply negative holder which is to be used
> with a transparency unit (a light source) on top of the scanner.
>
> I don't know owning a used drum scanner is a smart idea. Drun scanner
> requires a lot of work to use. Plus, recent flatbed scanners are good
> for LF films, and dedicated film scanners for MF and 35mm. A good MF
> film scanner still costs $2k, though.
>
> However, I noticed some time ago that the number of film scanners on
> current production is far smaller than it once was.
>
X
Received on Sun Dec 18 17:32:37 2005