Options for used drum scanners

[Ed Richards]

Several folks have mentioned getting used drum scanners cheaply. I am curious about the models that are out there and how hard they are to tune and repair. Are they mostly mechanical, i.e., is the scanner head driven by screw or by a stepper?

[Jonathan_5775]

It's actually something I've given serious consideration to - but since have given up on due to the likely ODIOUS learning curve of mechanics/software involved. It's taken me a few years just to get up to speed with LinoColor with my Heidelberg flatbed...! But maybe I'm a bit slow.

[julian_4860]

One thing you need to be aware of is that old drums (and some newer ones) are only driven by outdated computers. usually mac g3 or 4s. not the best beasts for shifting large files around, and in some countries (like where I am) service is very patchy. service is very often a return to base, unless you can get a service contract, and you have to be fanatical about dust.

[Frank Petronio]

Buy two - one for parts...

[paulr]

"old drums (and some newer ones) are only driven by outdated computers. usually mac g3 or 4s"

is it a hardware or software issue that keeps them from working with newer ones? if it's something like SCSI it seems that could be added to a new computer. is it proprietary scan software that only works on an old OS?

[bglick]

Ed..... Drum scanners are pretty much taking the path of dinosaurs. To my knowledge, only Howteks remains, which is now Aztek and Heidleberg still sell new drum scanners. I only mention "new" as these two have the best liklihood of parts for repair being available.

As for them being mechanical beasts, you bet they are.... Hi speed relatively large drums vibrating like crazy.... yep, wear and tear is normal, bearings, belts, drives, alignment, all the issues of any high speed device surface when discussing drum scanners.

I owned and used two Howteks, 4500 & 8000, and when finely tuned, they can't be beat. However, there is software support issues also.... the only supported software for Howteks are Aztek which run on PC only, and the older Colorbyte software, Trident, which, they will still sell, but to my knowledge, no updates for many years....which can cause problems with new operating systems, etc. So its a real touch and go situation......

If you need to scan a lot of film, and at super high quality, this option is tough to beat.... and the buy decision is heavily weighted towards price / availability of parts. Buying a scanner with no support, even at $.10 on the dollar can leave you with NO scanner if something fails on the mother board and no such replacement is made, hence why the bottom has fallen out of the prices. New prices still high, Aztek approx $30k for starter kit, and Heidlberg about $50k.

I am in the same boat, and have been trying to come up with a long term strategy.... it seems the Nikon 9000 for MF film is equally as good a drum scanner and if the film is not too big you are scanning, say 4x5, you can cut it in half to scan it, not too hard to reassemble in PS. not everyone liked chopping film up. Larger film such as 810 seems to fall into no-mans land.... new scanners are the lower end flat beds, $500 range, to the high end Flatbeds $40k and of course the drums. The Imacons of course offer a mid term solution, but not for large film, as they don't have film holders for 5x7 or 810, at least from what I have read on their web site.

I was quite shocked to see some excellent scans by the Epson 4990, and if your enlargement factor is not too aggresive, this may suffice you fine.... and if not, you certainly did not waste much trying. its too bad a small size company did not step in to handle LF scanning for the dedicated LF users, although the market is small, it will still exist for many years...

Hope this helps....

[Frank Petronio]

Most people who have drum scanners also have a cheap Epson around for testing and proofs. In terms of production - or just checking out your film - the flatbed will outproduce the drum. Which is why printers and prepress houses have abandoned drum scanning. My friendly printer had his $200,000 early 1990s Crosfield carted away for scrap. It was a couple of tons.

The big Imacons will do 5x7 and 6x17.

The older Screens are good scanners, well made, but same caveat - buy two.

[tor kviljo]

Scanview series of drum scanners are still serviced & supported by Escographics of Denmark (now only making flat-beds), are table top machines weighting about 30 kilos or so, no vibrations to talk about - just a "whizz" when running, can be driven on old mac g3's (original set-up) but software exists for everything up to mac-today & Win 2000 etc. and there is free trial periode for trying out all recent software. However, I got away running my Scanview 5000 on the download for free Colortrio old & simple software driver - not updatet since win 95 or so but working nicely on win 2000 machine. The scanview 5000 & probably all of them are SCSI devices. There is quite a few LF people in Norway who have got their own Dainippon screen or Scanview desk-top drum for small money the latter years - probably reflecting a last-chance-to-get-one chapter of these things. However, I have not heard that anyone of LF here that have adopted any of the old & big beasts of 3-phase driven 500 kilo of drum scanner, but the smaller more modern units is worth a try I belive.

[Dave Rodenbaugh]

I owned and used two Howteks, 4500 & 8000, and when finely tuned, they can't be beat. However, there is software support issues also.... the only supported software for Howteks are Aztek which run on PC only, and the older Colorbyte software, Trident, which, they will still sell, but to my knowledge, no updates for many years....which can cause problems with new operating systems, etc. So its a real touch and go situation......

Actually, this isn't 100% true. Silverfast AI is available on the PC for the Howtek D4000/4500 and enjoys current support from them (whatever that means). I've been using mine for a year without any issues.

You might check Genesis Equipment Marketing (Google them) in AZ--that's where my scanner came from. Reasonable price, too. I wouldn't knock an older Howtek. The main beef I had with it was coming up with the right SCSI card/cable to mate it to my PC.

-D

[Bruce Watson]

Bill,

Your knowledge needs updating. There are three active manufacturers of drum scanners in the world today that I know of. These are Aztek in the USA, ICG in England, and Screen in Japan (I think that's where they make them). All three sell service and parts for older models. Aztek sell parts and service for the Howtek line. Heidelberg got out of the drum scanner biz a few years back - 2002 IIRC.

The Howtek mechanical design requires more maintenance than the others IMHO. It is seemingly common to replace belts and wear pads on Howteks. Other drum scanners have less maintenance requirements. Direct drive machines like Optronics ColorGetters don't have belts to replace, nor wear pads to wear out.

Ed,

To answer your questions: First, I would think you'd want to limit this discussion to the newer "table top" drum scanners unless you want to hire a rigger with a crane to set one of the six ton monsters in place after you reinforce the floor, and an electrician to handle the required three phase power. The table top models were aimed at small service bureaus that didn't have the space for a monster, and needed more flexibility out of their scanner. Most of these will do trannies and negatives as well as reflective scans (prints). On the used market today, I think the top models come from Optronics, Howtek, Screen, ICG, Scanmate, and Heidelberg.

Of these, the ICG software still doesn't allow 16 bit saves (it's new and up-to-date, so this is confusing). The Heidelberg Tango can be had on the used market, but it's optimized for trannies IMHO. I think that because operators have told me it's painful to do negatives with the software, and it has the largest minimum aperture of the bunch at 11 microns (a 6micron or 3 micron minimum aperture implies better sharpness, and film generally ranges from about 3 microns up to about 12 microns). The large aperture implies small enlargement factors like you would get if you were scanning trannies for magazine work.

This leaves the Optronics Colorgetters, the Howtek/Aztek line, the Screens, and the Scanmates. Quality of scan will be comparable I think (they all have strengths and weaknesses of course). The ColorGetters do excellent work with negatives if you get the latest copy of ColorRight 2.0 Pro which is still being sold (MacOS 8.6 - 9.1). The Howteks do excellent work with negatives as well, and the DPL software Aztek sells is supposed to be quite good, and quite expensive (PC only). The older Screens have excellent reputations, and the currently available Screen may be the best of the lot - it has a continuously variable aperture, which means that it has just about an infinite variety of true optical resolutions. The ScanMates are the smallest of the lot, but do excellent work. I have no idea if the software works well with negatives. As Tor says, you can still get them serviced. For that matter, you can still get ColorGetters serviced through Tech. Services International. At least you could - Kodak just bought them out this year so I have no idea what their policy is on ColorGetter service today.

Me? I own a ColorGetter. Years ago I bought another ColorGetter scan unit as a parts box. Preventive maintenance consists of keeping it clean - there's nothing to adjust, nothing to oil, no parts to change out. I recalibrate it about once a year, but the new calibration inevitably matches the old so it's sort of a useless gesture that just makes me feel good. The xenon lamps last for many years, but if you loose one they are expensive. Repairing a broken ColorGetter is not as bad as you'd think - there aren't that many parts, and about all you can do is swap parts with a parts box. I can do it, and I've gotta tell ya that I'm just not that special ;-)

From a mechanical perspective, drum scanners have two axes of freedom. The first is spinning the drum. The second is transversing the drum relative to the light source / optics. The drum speed is usually controlled through a feed back loop using an optical encoder on the drum shaft as reference. The tranversing (either the drum system, or the optical system) is almost always done with a stepper motor driving a lead screw. Simple reliable systems for the most part.

If you want to get really in depth about drum scanners, you might want to join the scan hi-end yahoo group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ScanHi-End/messages). I think you have to join to read the current messages and search the archives. There's a wealth of information here, and some helpful souls to boot.

[Roger Krueger]

As of a year ago I could still get parts and service for my Screen 1045--haven't broken it since then :)

But I did have to pay several hours of drive time from Ontario (N.E. of Los Angeles) to San Diego, which was pretty ugly.

On the old Screens there is a gotcha--the 1015 and 1030 are 8-bit-only, bad news for negs. Only the 1045 is 16-bit.

Also, on the 1015-1030-1045 you're limited to 16,000 pixels in each direction, which means you'll need to do really huge scans in pieces and assemble later. But it's not a big deal because, since you're not remounting, your registration is perfect, you can batch it, and you don't have the falloff issues that can make piecing together scans from a line-at-a-time scanner ugly.

Single scans from the Photoshop plug-in I believe work up to MacOS 9.2, but the batch software only runs on 8.1--which is fine, I had an old beige G3 I wasn't using handy. You gotta think in batch mode with these things--load her up and go to bed.

My 1045 is a floor model, but it's not that huge--about as annoying to moving as a couch with someone sitting on it.

Measure carefully--mine was a couple of inches longer than the seller had indicated, and this was the difference between making and not making the turn into the spare bedroom. Explaining to a woman that a drum scanner is marooned in her living room for the forseeable future is about as unpleasant as it gets.

[Bruce Watson]

The Heidelberg Tango can be had on the used market, but it's optimized for trannies IMHO. I think that because operators have told me it's painful to do negatives with the software, and it has the largest minimum aperture of the bunch at 11 microns...

Mea culpa. I was wrong. Tangos have a minimum aperture of 10 microns. Doesn't really change what I was saying here much, but it still needs to be corrected.