Phone the owner of the lab, he/she will/ should be concerned. 1k of scans is a very good order for any service company and if you are not happy you are the client.
I would be extremely suprised if they did not give you immediate attention and work to solve the issues.
Originally Posted by JW Dewdney
No - it's a umax derivative.. a 1450 or something (i forget). Personally - I'd pit a crosfield or a big Linotype-Hell against pretty much ANY modern scanner. There's no substitute for photomultiplier tubes attached to a good power supply in my book.
Yes, Kirk. My arch. stuff. I'm trying to work a different angle and show them a level of detail they've never seen before - kind of push the 'film advantage'. I normally prefer to walk in with work myself - although this size is sort of unwieldy. It remains to be seen how I'm going to 'handle' pieces this big.
Oh no, bob. I'm SURE they'll re-do. The scans just seemed really odd to me. There are also some steep cliffs on the black end of the histogram - that would seem to me to be an odd hardware limitation that really shouldn't be there on a PMT scanner.
The scans look pretty good once you clean them up - it's just that I found it quite odd to have to do alot of colour correction to get there (except for the shadows - which are a bit blocked). You'd think they'd target the right range of tones first - and then scan it - seems you should be able to do this on a PMT scanner.
Particularly with drum scans one is at the mercy of the competence of the operator. Over the last decade I've paid for well over a hundred drum scans from several labs. Even within the same lab the quality has occasionally varied considerably. A few scans I've gotten back from well respected labs that usually do great work have been simply mediocre. Probably the most common issues are color balance and foreign matter like dust that requires excessive amount of cloning out work. Notable and importantly, I've never had a drum scan come back that wasn't sharp. Generally for large format any of the various drum scan models are more than capable of excellent output for typical 40x50 inch max print intentions given a good operator As for the operator issue, one can imagine even the most respected labs have a number of people that do scanning and that during times like vacations, before Christmas, and when workloads are high, it is likely some work might be done by those of less experience who don't exactly work like the regular operators.
With the foreign matter/dust issue the problem might be dusty scanning room air, inadequate dusting, and especially dirty reused oil. I dust my transparencies before sending them in so any stuff on the scan file is mainly the result of the lab process. When using a new lab, I always bother to discuss what they do regarding dusting transparencies as I am not of fan of brushes. I'd rather prefer labs use high compressed air like I do. For color and image quality, of course the operator can gang mount several transparencies on a drum at the same time. Thus if each is scanned at the same time, the raw photomultiplier outputs will be the same for all slides instead of being optimized dependent on the actual image. Suspect that is why I have seen dark images come back too dark as though the operator never considered boosting the sensitivity a bit to compensate for the dynamic range. With 8-bit scans I've tended to ask for, that of course is more an issue to later post processing work though has never been that big a deal to ask for a re-scan. I tend to make labs aware I expect decent color balance and neutral color. If one does not emphasis that, the operator may try and boost the colors to what many customers prefer. For instance with fall color and sunset shots, extra saturation, reds, and purples. The better labs like WCI make clear the resulting drum scan file will be far from print ready, usually somewhat dark, color neutral, and flat so customers can do those adjustments in Photoshop themselves. ...David
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