Drum scanning technology: Why so expensive?

[Kirk Gittings]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Richards View Post
...scanned on an optimized consumer scanner, can produce prints that are TECHNICALLY as good as any AA master print.

I have the good fortune to personally know some of the best inkjet printers in the country and this is not really true in a sense. This implies that you could do an inkjet print from a AA negative that was indistinguishable from a silver print and I sincerely doubt that. There are things that digital printing can do better than traditional and vice versa. Each medium should be respected for what it does best, but in a sense but they are not really directly comparable.

This endless comparison between traditional and digital misses the point.

[Rob Landry]

Look, you drum scanner guys need to tone down the consumer flatbed scanner bashing on this forum. I mean seriously, every time someone mentions an Epson, the same statements keep getting repeated "no good for more than a 2-3x enlargement", "good for negs but not trannies", "every scan has a veil over it" yada yada yada. While I agree that there are differences between a drum and an Epson, I think some of the statements that are being tossed around are a slight exaggeration. I agree with Ed, much of this discussion seems to be absolutist rhetoric which can be misleading to newcomers. The discussion is really more academic than anything. I don't own a consumer flatbed, but I have had a few drum scans made over the years. If I was buying a scanner now, a used drum would not be in my sights; too old, too prone to breakdown, to slow, too expensive for an antique with no support and too much trouble messing with wet mounting fluid, mylar overlays and the need to spin your film a ridiculous RPMs. For what, an extra 5% that may or may not show on an limited resolution inkjet print? Seriously, how many here print at anything over 16x20? Crap, I haven't made a 16x20 in years.

Try this link at Photo-i and read the entire thread, with emphasis on the comments by Quentin, who is/was the owner of the ScanHi-End Yahoo group.

http://www.photo-i.co.uk/BB/viewtopic.php?t=49

He owns a Howtek and bought a 4990. I think you'll find his comments surprising. The links to his test scans no longer work (older thread) but I did save them to my hard drive when the thread first appeared but don't want to post them for copyright reasons. Lets just say that there are differences, but they are slight. Roger N. Clark has also done quite a few comparisons between drums and flatbeds and is quite well regarded in his field and he didn't buy a drum scanner either.

[Bruce Watson]

...every time someone mentions an Epson, the same statements keep getting repeated "no good for more than a 2-3x enlargement", "good for negs but not trannies", "every scan has a veil over it" yada yada yada. While I agree that there are differences between a drum and an Epson, I think some of the statements that are being tossed around are a slight exaggeration.

You can think what you want. No one is stopping you. This is an excellent example of what John Heywood said way back in 1546:

"A man maie well bring a horse to the water, but he can not make him drinke without he will."

Me? I didn't believe it either. But over the last four or five years I've done enough testing to convince myself. Scanning the same negative with several different scanners. Making real prints off the same printer with the same settings and the same inks onto the same paper. Side by side comparisons under the same lights.

What you "think" to be a 5% difference my experience says is closer to 20%.

I wish you were right. It sure would make my life simpler if you were right. But the truth is the truth and we all have to live with it.

But this thread isn't about whether drum scanning is worth it or not. The OP wanted to know why drum scanning is so expensive, and that question was answered long ago. It's well past time for this thread to be put to bed.

[Ted Harris]

Rob with due respect, no one is bashing consumer scanners in this or most of the other threads here. If you read closely you will see that most of the posts referring to high end scanners say that for enlargements up to 8x10 or 11x4 at least that the consumer scanners perform quite well, well enough that if you see any difference int he prints at all it won;t be unless they are side by side with one from a high end scan and even that will be very had to tell .. again if at all. The differences become apparent for larger prints and for difficult negatives/chromes. I think you will also find that there are frew that denigrate the ability fo the consumer machines to scan trannies ... at least I don't.

Finally, two comments on the thread you mentioned: 1) He was running a Howtek 4000, a very long-in-the tooth-early generation drumn scanner. 2) He mentioned a DMax for the 4990 of "maybe 3.5" and that is unlikely as we have tested the DMax of that machine at it is ~ 2.25 which is in the smae ballpark as that of all the consumer scanners v. a ballpar of ~3.8 - 4+ for most of the high end scanners.

Again, I don;t think there is any bashing intended or going on. BTW, I run both a high end Screen scanner and a Microtek 1800f. Which gets used depends on what is getting scanned and the eventual end use.

[Brent McSharry]

Brent - Adams and all the other folks working on controllling exposure and development have written on this. You can see Adams, The Print, or for a more modern treatment (with all the technical detail you could want), Way Beyond Monochrome. Bottom line, 256 is about the best case, and that is not under standard illumination - you need a bright, point source light, and, ideally, you are printing on high gloss film

Thanks for the reply and summary ed: i'll get round to reading that stuff one day, but I was told years ago to try and master colour or b/w but not both, and I went the way of the heathens (well for this site anyway)! Nonetheless I love picking the collective brains out there in the ether - most b/w of you b/w guys seem to be walking encyclopedias.

part of my work involves reading x-rays, and I actually thought the number of discernable shades would be less, but the edge detection stuff makes sense from experience(ie if there is a sharp transition it is discernable, but not a gradual one).

[Chris_Brown]

Hey all, first post on this forum. I've been looking for a good LF discussion board. Looks like a motly crew here.

I saw this post/question about drum scanning and have spent enough time and money to respond fairly.

Are the machines that make drum scanning possible so complicated that only professional labs are able to afford/use them?

Drum scanners are far more complex then their flatbed/CCD counterparts. More moving parts, more sensitive PMT and A/D hardware. And because the drum spins quickly, the dang thing must be built on a heavy platen to minimize abberations from vibrations.

Seems like everything in photography has come down in price, except perhaps MF digital backs, but drum scanning technology feels like it's stuck in time with nothing new over the horizon.

Drum scanning was the only game in town for high quality 15+ years ago. The pre-press trade had apprentices and journeyman scanner operators getting $15 - $30 per hour running Crosfield and DS Screen scanners.

The first crack in the dam was cheap scanners being used by cheap clients who didn't care about color reproduction in catalogs - the largest pool of color printing clients in the world. The second crack was digital cameras. Within five years most pre-press shops went out of business, much like type houses in the early 90's.

As this new tech ate away at drum scanning, a few hardy people bought the technology rights to these things and put them in smaller, desktop enclosures. Unfortunately, the market was so small that the price needed to stay high to pay for the cost of doing business.

From the few used drum scanners I see pop up every now and then, it requires the use of a Mac G4 with SCSI, and the scanner is still quite expensive.

Currently, there is only one company in the US that is actively developing drum scanner hardware and software, and it's a Windows-based system.

I use a Howtek HiResolve 8000 hosted with Trident scanning software. ColorByte Software no longer develops Trident - they are busy developing ImagePrint RIP. So when I scan, I use an older G4 running OS 9 with a SCSI port. Ancient, but highly effective in getting killer scans from 4x5 and 8x10 transparencies.

Now, I will go back to browsing the rest of this forum!

~ CB