Which Drum - High End Flatbed good for the next 30 years?

[Ed Kelsey]

I predict film will not exist in 30 years.

[Miguel Curbelo]

I know very little about scanners, but I have found someone in Germany who sells refurbished Heidelberg flatbed scanners that work with OS X (up to 10.5) and Silverfast. He also offers repairs and spare parts. His business seems to be based on what he describes as "Scanner bundles". Beyond that, I know nothing about them.
http://www.high-end-scanner.com/english/index.html
Just in case anyone is interested...

[gth]

What about these guys:

http://www.colortrac.com/pdf/Gx+28_lo.pdf

Are they useless for photo scanning? Claim is 1,200 dpi which is respectable for 4x5 and 8x10. Especially if they are real in focus pixels. Up to 28 In image width so ULF?

Seems to be in the $5,000 region, new, supported. Has RAW output.

I like the principle with the moving image and stationary sensor/optics.... questions is, how good is the optics? Good enough for photo work?

Would also work for scanning prints. Available up to 40 in in width.

[gth]

Never mind.... only reflective scanning....

[Brian Vuillemenot]

On a related note, what is the life expectancy of an Epson scanner? My 4990 is still going strong after 7 years and thousands of scans, and I wasn't planning on replacing it anytime soon...

[polyglot]

In the hacky stakes, you could put a DSLR and macro lens on a really shoddy X-Y gantry (about $500 for the gantry, $1000 for new DSLR+lens, a bit of cash for a glass sheet and backlight) and shoot your film in little 1x1" squares, about 1s/sq.in.

It's pretty easy to automate stitching of the frames to produce one honking big file at at least 4000 dpi using current off-the-shelf consumer gear. And it scales easily to 40x40", limited only by how much memory you can cram into your PC.

[Karl Hudson]

Well, unfortunately I've been to New Delhi, and while I was there I worked on Hell Scanners that were built in 1983...that's pretty close to thirty years old. There are plenty of printing presses still in daily use that are 60 years old. A machine will stay alive as long as there is someone around who loves it. I happen to love the Tango / Primescan and S3800 / S3900. They were built in Germany from the finest materials and they were built to run in a daily high-production environment. I can easily see them lasting 30 years. Silverfast will drive it on a Snow Leopard machine today. As long as Lasersoft can stay in business, then maybe they'll keep on porting the microprogram over to newer and newer Operating Systems. There's actually a lot of love for these old German scanners across the globe, so I think they'll be around for a long time. Part of my mission is to teach end-users how to do their own maintenance. Contact me off-forum if you are interested.
Karl

[John NYC]

There are plenty of printing presses still in daily use that are 60 years old.
Karl

Of course there are going to be exceptions. But really, a printing press is something that is very, very old technology that wasn't even beginning to get outmoded as a process until very, very recently. It was also built with industrial strength most of the time. Most stuff we use today electronics-wise is not built to last. That is a fact.

Also, our way of using technology is changing at a much faster rate than in the past 50 years. Some of my young relatives don't even have a voice mail account set up on their mobile phones because they view voice mail as an outmoded technology... "If someone calls me and I don't answer, they can call back and they know I saw they called because of caller ID... if they need me right away, they can text that it is urgent that they speak to me... so what does voice mail do for me?" I have to say, they are right and they changed my own mind about using voice mail for personal use. Same types of things will happen with photography in the next 30 years... ideas and ways of working will become outmoded even if some of the technology lasts. Maybe it will be niche only or maybe it will go away entirely.

Come up with a list of 30 pieces of electronic gear (that were built recently in this new age of throw-away and planned obsolescence) you are using today and tell me which exact pieces you expect you will be using in 30 years.

[europanorama]

Few years ago I made a whole exhibition "scanning" 4x5' and 5x7' negatives with Nikon D200 multiples captures, up to 36 shots if memory doesn't fail, and since then I'm pretty much convinced that a digital back is the way to go.
Of course, this route offers some obvious drawbacks, but I guess the advantages may worth the trouble of building a good enough set up, so to keep everything aligned and parallel.
Here are some points:
1- it's a evolving not dying technology;
2- it's easy to upgrade (if one can afford so, of course!);
3- Raw files are easy to get and available programs are much more powerful then usual scanning softwares;
4- one can make files as big as it's patience and technique goes;
5- digital back are much more versatile than scanners!

By this time I used a Sinar P front standard as a negative stage, but having a digital back installed on the right place and a third one for the lens would make a very confortable setup and kind of cheap nowadays.

Of course I don't mean to compare quality against top drum scanners, but here in Brazil it would be kind of crazy to invest on Aztec or similar toys, wich I guess may be true to a lot of people around the world.

When Sigma showed large prints of their SD14 at photokina, i could not see any D200 at Nikon stand. One could imagine why. BTW: with some of the outside prints i was not very lucky.
I would wait for the new fuji-camera-system.