"Im from a totally normal middle class-ish family."
Maybe that's why you can't comprehend the idea of being poor in a fashion that doesn't let you escape, even working as hard as you possibly can and making all the right choices.
I have seen kids from poor families make it. Many have been highly successful in life, even we should not measure it by pay-check.
It usually boils down to alcohol/drugs, idiotic credit card debts and/or living way beyond your actual capability to sustain that lifestyle, and having zero savings, and possibly having children way too young.
Do you use it with an old computer, or do you have a good way to interface a SCSI scanner with a modern machine? I tried to get my Precision II up and running but the SCSI card driver would crash Windows at random intervals.
This is way out of date. I have since been able to get it working on a Windows 11 4th gen Intel machine with 64-bit drivers cobbled together from a couple of versions of FlexColor and some .inf modification. It's not flawless, there's some major corruption that can occur when trying to use certain operations, but overall it works for my needs.
It'd be nice if they were able to adapt the Hasselblad/Imacon "virtual drum" concept and curve the film underneath the sensor for side-to-side flatness. I wonder if that's feasible with a 2D sensor.
Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner
> Thats a good question. I wonder if the "virtual drum" was there to get over film holding issues (as in it physically bends the film) or that its a line scanner
It's not - the issue that still remains is keeping the film flat, and this is especially problematic with smaller formats. With current solutions you can get the resolution but not the flatness, or you sacrifice something to get the flatness (e.g. ANR glass holders). It's the old glass vs glassless carrier debate, applied to a modern workflow.
I repeat myself: focus, DPI / resolution, dynamic range - these are the solved problems. In fact, modern medium format digital cameras are superior on all these factor. Keeping the film flat, however? Only drum scans and the Imacon "Flextight" solution do this well.
Of course, it depends on what you plan to do with the scans and for 99% of people the solution in the link above is more than good enough.
I've written about this previously https://leejo.github.io/tags/scanning/ # I'm going to add the fourth, and hopefully final, part in a couple of months time.
The issue with LEDs, is very pure colors. That’s actually a bit of a problem, with film scanners. You need a smooth curve, and it needs to extend out a bit. You don’t want areas of color being missed.
The Coolscans had a light color response (think the “levels” screen, in Photoshop) that looked like three steep hills, with minimal overlap, but they were able to make them wider than a “pure” LED. Coherence is a feature of LED lighting.
Most previous light sources used filters over a white light, and they looked “sloppier,” with a lot more overlap, so there was more coverage. We had to correct for the unusual color coverage of LEDs.
One of the things that the Coolscan did well from a hardware perspective was that it made the transport sprocketless which allowed damaged film to be easily scanned, and it also allowed non-standard formats to be scanned easily as well. I’m curious if they have a sprocket driven system for this or if it utilizes a similar system as the Coolscan - I’ve used many scanners and the Coolscan is still the best/most convenient because of being able to just sequentially scan an entire roll of negatives.
I assume the LEDs were matched to the typical pigments used in films though? Because otherwise metamerism just wouldn't work, RGB mixed to some CCT is not white light and can't illuminate arbitrary pigments with any kind of good color reproduction.
I assume so. The folks that designed the scanners were no slouches. I suspect that they never completely turned off any LEDs, so there was always some deliberate “slop.” With LEDs, however, you can explicitly control that. They probably had some kind of filter, also. I never took one apart, though.
I got the response curves by feeding in a special slide with a diffraction grating.
The curves were markedly different from an incandescent light source.
It seems like folks buy a used Coolscan, scan their stuff, then sell it. They seem to last pretty well. I'm about to buy a used one to scan my Dad's old slides. And then sell it.
The slide feeder is good but it's worth being aware that if you have slides mounted on cardboard (I had a lot of old family photos like this I used it for) it will often grab a couple at once. You can fix that by clipping eg a driver's licence in the right place to narrow the gap it pulls the slides through, but it will still need some manual supervision.
If you get one, have a look at VueScan on the software side - the original software needs (I think) a Windows XP virtual machine to drive it.
They also sucked. I had an LS-2000 and the images were noisy as hell and it couldn't scan negatives for shit. I sold it on eBay. It's incredible how overrated the Nikon scanners were.
In the end I found a new in-box Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 II, pretty much the end of the line for film scanners. I haven't tried it yet!
The 4000-5000 series Nikon Coolscans sell for about the same price they did 20 years ago because they still produce excellent scans and there’s nothing quite as good for that $1000-$15000 price out there.
The APOLLO lunar laser ranging experiment uses a 3.5 meter telescope as a laser turret and manages to get about 2,400 photons back from those retroreflectors every half an hour, and it's a challenge just to find the things as the spot's a few km wide by the time it gets to the moon. Good luck.
Yeah, I was just doing some calculations on this. You'd think that with 3.5 meters you could do better than a few kilometers, wouldn't you? Is something wrong with their telescope?
I don't know what wavelength they're using, but at 555nm, 1.22λ/d would be 0.193 microradians, which, unless I'm doing the math wrong, works out to a 74-meter Airy-spot radius at the distance to the moon. At that sort of size, you'd think the majority of the photons in the desired wavelength band would be from their laser rather than stray Earthshine.
I was doing calculations based on λ = 350nm and a 500-mm reflector, and no retroreflector, and getting rather sad estimates of 3 joules of light transmitted per returned photon (per receiver). While that's clearly a feasible commnications system, it's going to be pretty limited in bandwidth. I'm not sure if C-band radio is better?
