Drum scanning, any good books or websites:

[Ed Bray]

Just bought a very nice Scanmate 11000 on ebay, The scanner comes with two drums (one a little worn, the other pristine), mounting station, approximately 100 mounting sheets, plenty of drum cleaner and mounting oil, ColorQuartet (v4.0) + dongle, Macintosh Power PC (OS 9), keyboard, mouse, a drum cleaner brush, and it's own flight case.

I was wondering if there were any good books or websites on Drum Scanning, I realise that it will be a steep learning curve but I am prepared to put the necessary work in to give me the best results.

TIA

[dave_whatever]

Nice one Ed, I was keeping my eyes on that, was going to have a punt but it was too far for me to collect at the moment. Looks like you got a good deal, all the peripherals there must be worth a few hundred at least.

[Daniel Stone]

mounting is like developing film:

everyone has their own "method", but there's only "so many" ways to skin a cat ;)

practice makes perfect. DO NOT RUSH ANYTHING. Don't beat yourself up if you don't get a mount correct the first time. Experience and doing it over and over again will eventually have all the blocks fall into place with your routine/workflow.

welcome to the "big-britches" club, as I like to call it :)

-Dan

[Ed Bray]

Nice one Ed, I was keeping my eyes on that, was going to have a punt but it was too far for me to collect at the moment. Looks like you got a good deal, all the peripherals there must be worth a few hundred at least.

Yes, I did a bit of research before deciding to buy it (there is a similar one in the EU going for just under £4000), the distance helped too as it is only a 200 mile round trip to collect it. I nearly jumped last week when he had a starting price of £950 and it didn't sell, he relisted it for £750 starting and I got it for £797 plus the 4 gallons of fuel to collect it seems like a 'Brucie Bargain' (I nearly have paid that for my V750, Better scanning holders and upgrade of Silverfast).


mounting is like developing film:

everyone has their own "method", but there's only "so many" ways to skin a cat ;)

practice makes perfect. DO NOT RUSH ANYTHING. Don't beat yourself up if you don't get a mount correct the first time. Experience and doing it over and over again will eventually have all the blocks fall into place with your routine/workflow.

welcome to the "big-britches" club, as I like to call it :)

-Dan

Thanks Daniel, I have done a fair bit of wet mounting on my V750 and whilst I realise it is not the same, I am hoping the experience will stand me in good stead. I really can't wait to see what I can get out of my 5"x7" pyro negatives.

[LF_rookie_to_be]

Oliver seems to have had some problems with high-dpi scans from this scanner when he bought it a year ago (for £250). The scans were garbled, probably a software issue. Hopefully he managed to solve it. I wholly recommend CQ 5.3.1 and OS X 10.4, this is what works fine with my 3000.

[bob carnie]

I too was looking for good books on scanning when I bought my gear, sadly I have never been able to find a good series of books for this.

[Ed Bray]

Oliver seems to have had some problems with high-dpi scans from this scanner when he bought it a year ago (for £250). The scans were garbled, probably a software issue. Hopefully he managed to solve it. I wholly recommend CQ 5.3.1 and OS X 10.4, this is what works fine with my 3000.

Ouch, that is not what I wanted to hear.

[Bruce Watson]

I was wondering if there were any good books or websites on Drum Scanning, I realise that it will be a steep learning curve but I am prepared to put the necessary work in to give me the best results.

I searched high and low and never found a useful book on drum scanning. The market for such books is extremely small which is probably why none or few were published.

As to drum scanning websites, I haven't found any of those either. But there are resources. Such as the Scan Hi-End yahoo group. It's painful to search, but there's much good information there. The files section can be very interesting depending on what you're looking for. And it's still an active group, so posting questions there will often net you good answers.

Drum scanning does have its learning curves, yes. But it's no worse or more difficult than learning how to use a view camera. In the case of the drum scanner, there's two major parts. First, how to make a clean and bubble-free wet mount on a drum. This is pretty much common to all drum scanners. The second part is the scanner's software. This is specific to the drum scanner you own. What I know about ColorGetters doesn't translate to ScanMates.

So again, your best bet is to find someone who already knows how to run your scanner. And that takes us full circle back to the Scan Hi-End yahoo group.

[cdavis324]

I have a scanmate 11000 also. The problem is that the scanmate only allows scan lines of 22500 pixels(or there about) in 8 bit(half that in 16bit). When scanning in higher resolution, you either need to stitch, or scan in 8 bit. Either way, the work arounds aren't too bad. The scanner is magical for 35mm - I don't know how it is able to resolve detail so well while keeping grain in check.

[sanking]

As Bruce mentions the ScanHi-End forum is a great resource.

I have never seen a general book on using drum scanners or other high end professional type scanners. However, most of this equipment originally came with very detailed manuals and instructions. Unfortunately the documentation is often not included in the sale of used high end scanners. But it may be available in .pdf format if the equipment was manufactured after this format became widely used and you can find a lot of such documentation in the Files section of the ScanHi-End forum.


Sandy

[LF_rookie_to_be]

I have a scanmate 11000 also. The problem is that the scanmate only allows scan lines of 22500 pixels(or there about) in 8 bit(half that in 16bit). When scanning in higher resolution, you either need to stitch, or scan in 8 bit. Either way, the work arounds aren't too bad. The scanner is magical for 35mm - I don't know how it is able to resolve detail so well while keeping grain in check.

What about RAW 16-bit scans? Do you manage getting a non-garbled RAW scan, and if so, using which version of ColorQuartet? I know about holding "alt" while selecting "16-bit" option in CQ, but the scan I get is still garbled. I have a Scamate 3000.

[Ed Bray]

Thank you all for your help so far. Off to find 'ScanHi-End'

[Lenny Eiger]

Take a look at my drum mounting demo on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APSzB0nX5Vo

It should help a bit...

Good luck,

Lenny

[Ed Bray]

Thanks Lenny, I watched your video and another I hadn't seen before, looking forward to tomorrow now.

[Peter York]

Scan Hi-end, a local operator, here, and Youtube are probably the best resources. Aztek is probably great for certain questions.

The funniest advice I remember was to be very careful with static electricity and flammable fluids: "scuff scuff, BOOM, no more eyebrows"

[cdavis324]

Im assuming that by garbled you mean colored lines in the direction the drum travels? If so, try scanning at a lower resolution. I'm not sure about the 3000, but the max pixels per line I mentioned are for the 11k.

My scanmate is currently out of commission and has been sitting in its shipping crate for the past 8 months, but I would use 16 bit rgb, or 8 bit lab in cq4. I did raw scans, but found that selecting raw as the file format didn't ever work properly. In cq4, selecting 16 bit generates a raw file anyways - it never acknowledges any settings you make outside resolution and aperture. I concur with what the other guys said about the scan hi end group - its a pain to go through the archives, but there's a ton of info about scanmates... Especially the max file size issue.

[Ed Bray]

Thanks again, I joined the ScanHi-End group and have already found some useful information.

[Adam Long]

Ed, I'm in a similar situation but a couple of weeks ahead of you - I picked up a Scanmate 5000 on ebay UK a few weeks back. It didn't come with a computer so I spent a fair while reading around whilst waiting to get the various bits together.

Impressions so far - its a lot easier than I'd been led to believe. Seems like there are a lot of horror stories on the net. I guess folk like to vent somewhere when things go wrong! A lot of the problems seem to be related to getting the SCSI interface working properly - I failed on Win 7 64-bit but it worked no problems on Win XP 32-bit. No idea how much life there is in it, but the way I look at is if, with commercial scans costing £15-25+, if I get that value out before it dies then no bother. I daresay it will go a lot longer - they are solidly built machines and I'm not hammering it like a commercial user would.

When I picked it up from a commercial print shop, I was surprised by the owner telling me he had never bothered with wet mounting. He gave me a roll of Tesa tape and suggested I try just taping the sheets on individually. So that's what I did - and the results at 2000dpi blew my previous Epson 750 scans away. Really impressive - after ten years using a Nikon 8000 these are still the best scans I've seen by some margin. I guess wet mounting improves things even further whilst reducing dust and scratches too. Looking forward to trying it, I think a DIY mounting station may be the next project...

The latest software and manuals are available here: http://www.abc-scan.dk/International/Downloads/download.htm
You can get fresh scanning supplies here (not many places in the UK): http://www.haynes-graphic-arts.co.uk/kami.html

I have all the original V5 software, boxed with manuals, but used the stuff from the links above as it is newer and the manual is better. I ended up with a spare Mac dongle for V5 too, so if you decide to upgrade let me know - no idea what its worth tbh!

Brief experiments with colourspaces suggest you might get better shadow detail from 8-bit LAB colour than 16-bit RGB, but I haven't really figured out what the best settings are yet. There doesn't seem to be anyway to control the physical exposure when scanning, and the output is a bit on the dark side (always plenty of room for highlights though), so shadows seem to be trickier than highlights.

Good luck anyway, let me know if you find any good tricks!

[Ed Bray]

Thanks for the post Adam, hopefully we can assist each other.

I picked the scanner and items up today, a lot bigger (and heavier) than I expected, and at the moment it is in its flight case in the hallway blocking the doorway as I don't have anywhere to put it yet. I thought it would fit on the windowsill as it is about 4ft long, I didn't realise it was going to be so deep, i'll have to add an extension to the sill to allow it to sit there.

It came with a lot of chemicals and 100 sheets of Mylar and the mounting station is the genuine Scanmate one and looks in great condition. I'm looking forward to setting it up and trying it out later this week.

[Adam Long]

I'd be interested to hear about any other folk's workflows when scanning when using ColorQuartet/ Colortrio and Scanmate scanners.

I'm running a Scanmate 5000 via ColorQuartet 5 on Windows XP. I've run an IT8 calibration which seemed to work fine.

Everything I've learned prior would suggest saving in 16 bit tiff with the widest colour profile available - most of the scans I've made I've followed this, saving in Prophoto RGB and they look good, though fairly dark (histogram rarely reaches across to the right). I brighten them in Lightroom, opening up the shadows, but the darkest areas are fairly muddy with colour noise. There are a bunch of other colour spaces available which I haven't experimented with yet. Trying to scan to 16-bit RAW files seems to crash the scanner - any ideas?What format does RAW save in?

However the CQ manual recommends saving in LAB format tiff for the best results with IT8 calibration. I've experimented with this and it seems to gives better, cleaner shadow detail, but the files are only 8-bit. Lightroom has no problems working on the files, and they are half the size, but I have this nagging knowledge that 8 bit is throwing away information.

Anyone got any knowledge or experience to share?

[mortensen]

... I'd like to join the conversation, Ed and Adam.
I picked up a Scanmate4000 last fall, I haven't had much time to go deeply into it, but my DIY mounting station seems ok... I'll upload some photos in this thread soon:
http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?102466-DIY-mounting-station-for-drum-scanner-anyone

I have had plenty of good advice from Andrea Gazzoni (forum member, running a 5000 in italy), including precise measures of the original mounting station. Ed, you are lucky to have one! It's difficult to achieve proper alignment and built quality when you do it yourself.

A question: how do you set apertures and 'check' apertures in CQ? I can only find aperture setting in the preview menu, but I cannot assess the aperture chosen, i.e. how do I see a 100% crop of my preview in 4000dpi to check the graininess/blurriness of the aperture?

best,
lars

[Adam Long]

Hi Lars, thanks for the input.

Be keen to see some pictures of your mounting station, I've started the process of building one. Is it pretty close to the specs on your drawings on the other thread?

Apertures are set under the options for sharpening - you can download the full manual from ABC scan, the info is on pages 194-5, including making a small hi-res preview for checking sharpness. Unfortunately there isn't much info on the aperture settings - in the dropdown window they are just numbered 1-4 with no indication of which is biggest, smallest or actual sizes.

Have you played around with the output settings much?

Adam

[Adam Long]

Hi Lars, thanks for the input.

Be keen to see some pictures of your mounting station, I've started the process of building one. Is it pretty close to the specs on your drawings on the other thread?

Apertures are set under the options for sharpening - you can download the full manual from ABC scan, the info is on pages 194-5, including making a small hi-res preview for checking sharpness. Unfortunately there isn't much info on the aperture settings - in the dropdown window they are just numbered 1-4 with no indication of which is biggest, smallest or actual sizes.

Have you played around with the output settings much?

Adam

[cdavis324]

Hi Adam,

Before I broke my 11k, I would scan make raw scans of color negs in 8bit LAB, then in ps convert to 16 bit, then RGB, then de-noise to interpolate the data, and finally invert in Color Perfect. It's quite a weird workflow, and a bit counter intuitive, but I got beautiful files by doing it this way. I did some tests against 16bit RGB scans, and surprisingly the 8bit LAB won by a large margin - even with dense negs that are very compressed on the histogram.

In terms of aperture, I would scan 4x5 at 3200dpi on auto or 2. I've found that software noise reduction(as opposed to physically oversampling by selecting an aperture too large for the resolution) looks best - the images are bitingly sharp, while the grain is reduced afterwards via software. It seems to me that's what CastorScans is doing with their incredibly detailed, smooth 35mm scans on flickr.

Chris

[Ed Bray]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for adding to the discussion.

At the moment I am having difficulty with 5x7 scans using the 11000, I cannot seem to get the settings correct. I don't suppose you would have a screenshot of your settings for 4x5?

[Adam Long]

Good knowledge Chris, that chimes with my own tests on 8 bit LAB vs 16bit RGB.

Ed, just a thought but you might be running into as file size issue? I thinks its limited to ~2GB, which means for 5x7 you might be limited to <2000dpi to scan in a single pass. The alternative is to scan two overlapping crops separately, and combine later.

[Ed Bray]

Thanks for the suggestion Adam, even at small file sizes it is not liking it.

[cdavis324]

Ed,
I don't have a screenshot of my settings. My scanner is sitting in its crate waiting to be fixed... Can you describe the problem you're having? Keep in mind that you make aperture and auto/manual focus setting prior to making the preview scan. I assume you're using cq? I used cq 4 in os9, as I was unable to ever get the computer to see t he scanner in os10.

[Ed Bray]

I'm a bit screwed at the moment, I bought a later model G4 which had more memory and twin faster processors, I thought I would stick the drive and SCSI card from the older model into the newer one and be good to go, well that was a mistake, it wouldn't see the scanner at all, so I decided to change it back, and now it won't let me back into OS-X. What's worse is that neither of the Power Macs came with any operating system disks so I have had to order a set of OS9 and OS-X Tiger ones from ebay. I'll do it all properly then and see what's what.

[cdavis324]

Good luck. The clean install may fix your problem, but if it doesn't try installing the scsi driver for your card. There's a list of cards on the yahoo forum that should work in osX...

[mortensen]

FYI - I've posted a couple of photos of my DIY mounting station in the other thread (mentioned earlier in this thread)

[Ed Bray]

Good luck. The clean install may fix your problem, but if it doesn't try installing the scsi driver for your card. There's a list of cards on the yahoo forum that should work in osX...

Thanks, I'll keep you all updated.

[LF_rookie_to_be]

OS X, 10.4 in particular, can be a bit temperamental when it comes to SCSI cards. The best thing to do is get one of four Adaptec cards whose numbers are in the list of drivers (29160, 39160, 2930, 2906) included with 10.4 system. The latter two exist in several iterations, some of which don't work well on a Mac. The last driver (78XX) refers to the main chip on many Adaptec cards, many of which may work, though some require flashing - I'd stay away from that. In some instances, and this is maybe due to do the logicboard of some of the later G4 Macs, you need to remove all four .kext drivers and install just the driver for the card you have from the .dmg (all are on Adaptec website). And, as with anything SCSI, restart.

[Sideshow Bob]

I have a video on how to wet mount film on a ScanMate drum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCHS5yiF4Mc
Mr.Gale

[mortensen]

... I've seen yours and Lenny's several times already, Bob :)

[Ed Bray]

OS X, 10.4 in particular, can be a bit temperamental when it comes to SCSI cards. The best thing to do is get one of four Adaptec cards whose numbers are in the list of drivers (29160, 39160, 2930, 2906) included with 10.4 system. The latter two exist in several iterations, some of which don't work well on a Mac. The last driver (78XX) refers to the main chip on many Adaptec cards, many of which may work, though some require flashing - I'd stay away from that. In some instances, and this is maybe due to do the logicboard of some of the later G4 Macs, you need to remove all four .kext drivers and install just the driver for the card you have from the .dmg (all are on Adaptec website). And, as with anything SCSI, restart.

Thank you for this information, I have a AVA2906 SCSI card for each of the G4 systems, I also have a Adaptec 29160N which I tried on my Windows XP PC system but that asked me to update the firmware on the scanner, when I went to the abc-scan website it would not allow me to download the firmware as I was not registered so it was back to the drawing board and back to the MACs which I am completely unfamiliar with.

This is as much my problem as the scanning software is as I am not too familiar with MACs having been a PC user since the mid 90s, but I am sure I will get there eventually.

[LF_rookie_to_be]

Ed,

29160N card should work. Try doing a clean re-install of OS X 10.4, card driver (29160N (http://www.sendspace.com/file/7osngx)) and ColorQuartet from Abc-can website. Firmware is updated through CQscan (11000 firmware (http://www.sendspace.com/file/g86r6d)).

[Ed Bray]

Ed,

29160N card should work. Try doing a clean re-install of OS X 10.4, card driver (29160N (http://www.sendspace.com/file/7osngx)) and ColorQuartet from Abc-can website. Firmware is updated through CQscan (11000 firmware (http://www.sendspace.com/file/g86r6d)).

Thanks very much, I'll have another go this afternoon.

[Adam Long]

Thank you for this information, I have a AVA2906 SCSI card for each of the G4 systems, I also have a Adaptec 29160N which I tried on my Windows XP PC system but that asked me to update the firmware on the scanner, when I went to the abc-scan website it would not allow me to download the firmware as I was not registered so it was back to the drawing board and back to the MACs which I am completely unfamiliar with.

This is as much my problem as the scanning software is as I am not too familiar with MACs having been a PC user since the mid 90s, but I am sure I will get there eventually.

Ed, I was planning to run mine on an old Mac, as reading on the web seems to bring that up as the usual option. But having installed XP (as a dual-boot for testing) it worked perfectly, so I'm sticking with that. I'm not a fan of modern macs, let alone old ones, but XP is pretty solid and familiar.

One of my scanners required a firmware update, I just had to point CQ at the file and it did it all automatically. A single reboot and it worked fine.

[Ed Bray]

Okay, I have got the scanner up and working on my Main PC after installing the 29160N card and using the firmware upgrade that Marin supplied, I am using Windows XP Home 32 Bit as a dual boot along with Windows 7 64 Bit. This is great as I can now save the scans onto an internal 1TB drive and then work on them in 64Bit using CS6 from Windows 7 without having to move files around with memory sticks and the like.

I'm not sure how I will explain the lack of use of the 2x G4s and single G5 PowerMacs I bought to make this work. :-(

Still, happy days and thanks to you all for your help and suggestions, and I did manage to find a couple of books that may (or may not) prove useful:

Complete Scanner Handbook for Desktop Publishing: 1990-1991: Macintosh Edition

The Scanner Handbook: Complete Guide to the Use and Applications of Desktop Scanners

Not too much to lose if they prove to be of little use, they only cost me £2.81 each including shipping. :-)

[Dean Wilmot]

Hi Ed (or anyone else), Could you send me the Table of Contents for the Complete Scanner Handbook for Desktop Publishing: 1990-1991: Macintosh Edition book? Its very expensive on Ebay these days. Im wanting something to help me with drum scanning on a Howtek 4500. regards Dean