Scanning large pieces of film

[clay harmon]

Even though I am full fledged propeller-head with my own drum scanner, the drum will only hold up to about a 8x10 piece of film. I recently have run into the need to scan an older 12x20 negative from back in the day when carrying around 40 pounds of camera gear seemed like a really good idea.

Does anybody here have any experience with, and or know of, some good service bureaus that can handle a 12x20 negative?

[sanking]

Even though I am full fledged propeller-head with my own drum scanner, the drum will only hold up to about a 8x10 piece of film. I recently have run into the need to scan an older 12x20 negative from back in the day when carrying around 40 pounds of camera gear seemed like a really good idea.

Does anybody here have any experience with, and or know of, some good service bureaus that can handle a 12x20 negative?

Clay,

Ian Mazursky, who posts here, could do this for you. He has one of the large Howtek drum scanners, a 7500 I believe, that will scan a full 12X20, and offers scanning services.

http://www.prepressexpress.com/pages/scanning/scanning/samples.html

Sandy

[clay harmon]

Thanks Sandy. Just the info I needed.

[keith schreiber]

Hi Clay,

I was going to suggest Ian Mazursky too, but Sandy beat me to it. If that turns out to be too pricey, I recently acquired an EverSmart, and though it would have to be scanned in 2 sections and then stitched, I'd love to give it a try - no charge for an old friend. Email me if you are interested.

Cheers,
Keith

[sanking]

Hi Clay,

I was going to suggest Ian Mazursky too, but Sandy beat me to it. If that turns out to be too pricey, I recently acquired an EverSmart, and though it would have to be scanned in 2 sections and then stitched, I'd love to give it a try - no charge for an old friend. Email me if you are interested.

Cheers,
Keith

BTW, I own an EverSmart Pro and am about to embark on a project to scan and digitize all of my archive of 12X20 and 7X17 negatives. It is a good project for the long days of summer when it is too warm and humid here in the southeast US to venture outside.

In some respects the EverSmart offers some advantage over drum scanners in that you can scan at full resolution of the scanner over the entire area of large film. So Keith could scan a 12X20" negative at the maximum resolution of 2540 spi of his EverSmart scanner, I could scan at 3175 spi with my EverSmart Pro, and if you are lucky enough to own an EverSmart Supreme or Select you could scan at 5400 spi, if you need that kind of huge print.

Not sure of the resolution of the large Howtek drum scanner for film this size, but I think it is less than you can get with the EverSmarts.

Sandy

[sanking]

Would be curious to know at what resolution Ian scans 12X20 film with the Howtek 7500, and how long scans take at this resolution?

Scans with the Eversmart Pro averaged about 30 minutes per pass of 12X12" at resolution of 1270 dpi, and 120 minutes per pass at resolution of 2540 dpi. I am using an older G4 with 867 mhz processor, but scan speed is limited by the old logic board of the scanner, not the computer. Scanning with a more modern Eversmart Supreme or Select would no doubt go much faster.

Sandy King

[IanMazursky]

Hi Sandy,
It really depends on what i intend the scan to be used for.
Normally i scan a 12x20 to around 500mb-1gb. That usually takes 20-30 or so minutes at 833-1250 dpi.
At 2500 dpi (4.3gb) usually takes around an hour give or take. Not that many people have asked for a 4gb file but i have done a few.
I can scan up to 16x20 in one pass (5.7gb) on the large drum of my 7500. The max resolution of the large drum on the 7500 is 2500 dpi at a 10uM aperture (10.16 to be precise).
The small drum is limited to 16x11 but can go to 5000 dpi and 5uM aperture.
Not that i would ever scan at 5uM, at that point the grain looks like hail. Normally most film respond well to a 10 or 15uM aperture at full res.
Moving upward (less then 2500 dpi) the dpi usually matches the aperture. That produces a very nice scan with almost no grain.

There are trade offs between the 2 technologies. Im not sure about the eversmarts but i can scan anything up to 16x20 in a single pass at full res.
Our apertures are selectable and we can also change the focus. But our mounting times are probably double if not triple the time of a flatbed.
Mounting a 12x20 can take 5-10 minutes, un-mounting and cleaning is another 5 or 10. Mounting a 16x20 needs a 2nd person if you don’t customize your mounting table like i did.
On a side note, the large drum can really hold an 18x23 but the taping area for the mylar limits the film size down to 16.5x21.

I run my scanners with Azteks DPL, the software uploads a new lookup table for every scan giving a great histogram.
Im running it on a older PC that i have to upgrade, not for speed just for usability. Win2K is getting on my nerves.
The PC that is running my Premier is on XP which is much better. Btw, the Premier can do 8000 dpi at 3.2uM but is limited to 10x10”.

Really drum scanners are big slow beasts but you have to love them. They’re like an ugly duckling sitting in the corner.
The 7500 is 4 feet long, 2 feet deep and 2 feet tall and around 200lbs. I used to have a few Hell scanners that weighed over a ton!
I do miss those, the really big ones could scan a 20x24.

[sanking]

[QUOTE=IanMazursky;717441]Hi Sandy,
It really depends on what i intend the scan to be used for.
Normally i scan a 12x20 to around 500mb-1gb. That usually takes 20-30 or so minutes at 833-1250 dpi.
At 2500 dpi (4.3gb) usually takes around an hour give or take. Not that many people have asked for a 4gb file but i have done a few./QUOTE]


Ian,

Thanks for the information. Those scans are quite a bit faster than I would have imagined. It takes me 40 minutes to do a scan of 6X9 cm negative at 4000 dpi on the Howtek D4000!

The platen of the Eversmart limits you to 12X17" scans in one pass. But there is very little time lost in set-up as I am not scanning 12X20 with fluid mount, just put the negative directly on the glass emulsion side down. And stitching with Photoshop CS5 is very very fast and almost foolproof. Last time I scanned 12X20 was six or seven years ago and at the time I was stitching the files manually. Wow, PS really makes this so much easier and faster.

I compared several negatives at 2540 dpi and at 1275 dpi and there was almost no detail left on the negative in the lower resolution scan. Not surprising since I almost always exposed my 12X20 negatives at f/64 or f/90.

BTW, in going through this box of some 150+ 12X20 negatives I exposed in Spain in a two month trip in spring 2002 I am amazed how many duplicate negatives of the same scene I made. Would be hard to do that these days what with the cost of film!!

Sandy

[IanMazursky]

Hi Sandy,
Thats a lot of negs to go through. I also do the same thing, shoot multiples of the same scene and regret the cost later on.
Ive cut back a bit when shooting 12x20 but for portraits i need to shoot at least 2 or 3 just to make sure im in focus.
DOF is limited with my lenses on my Korona, even at F64. Luckily i have 300 sheets of HP5 and 100 sheets of old trix in the freezer to play with.
Our scanners have been designed to get every last nugget of data out of our film, almost regardless of the file size.

The 7500 is pretty fast all things considered (I cant believe shes almost 20 years old!), it was designed more for production work.
I can fit 4 8x10s on the large drum but in reality i usually mount only 2 at the same time.
By the time i mount 4, 2 scans would be finished so its easier to mount 2 per drum and keep it rolling.

The Premier on the other hand is about 2x faster then the 7500. It takes about the same amount of time to scan at 8k what the 7500 takes to scan at 5k.
The RPMs are also a lot faster on the Premier. It has to be a lot slower on the 7500s large drum because of vibrations.
Any faster and it would probably damage the bearings or even start to fracture the drum.

Mounting is the real time killer for drum scanning.
Clean the film, mount it, prescan, scan, unmount the film and then clean it. Lather, rinse repeat :D
You need to work out a system and train yourself. Ive done so many that i can almost do it in my sleep, well over 5k and counting.

DPL is a real champ in my drum scanning workflow. Aztek really did an amazing job with it.
Anyone who owns a howtek or aztek scanner should have it. I have found it much easier to use then Trident.
Once you get over the shock, it really speeds up your workflow, not to mention a much cleaner histogram.
Your also not tied to an old OS9 mac and files under 2gb, yes Trident has a 2gb file limit.
I love DPL so much that i just commissioned Aztek to make some changes for me. Expensive but worth every penny.

[Richard Mahoney]

Dear Clay,


Even though I am full fledged propeller-head with my own drum scanner, the drum will only hold up to about a 8x10 piece of film. I recently have run into the need to scan an older 12x20 negative from back in the day when carrying around 40 pounds of camera gear seemed like a really good idea.

Does anybody here have any experience with, and or know of, some good service bureaus that can handle a 12x20 negative?

Just to add to your list of options I thought I should mention another beast. The fellow who scans for me uses a Fuji Celsis 6250 (Crossfield):

Fujifilm: Support & Contact Center: Celsis 6250 CASC
http://www.fujifilmusa.com/support/ServiceSupportProduct.do?prodcat=238759

The data in the PDF brochure indicates that one can take it to 20" x 28", possibly at up to 8000 dpi (optical). Contra Ian, I'd say that there is nothing ugly about this machine. I'd be all too happy having it sitting in the corner, though I'm not sure how long our old wooden flours would support it. ... If you're able to track one down, together with someone who knows how to use it, then I'm certain it would do what you're after.


Kind regards,

Richard

[sanking]

Just to add to your list of options I thought I should mention another beast. The fellow who scans for me uses a Fuji Celsis 6250 (Crossfield):

Richard


Or how about a Screen DS 7060p? Will do up to 20X24" I understand. There is one on ebay now for $4k. Bet that monster cost close to $100k new.

Sandy

[SergeyT]

Sandy,

Does your Pro allow you to scan in DT format?

Thank you,
SergeyT.

[sanking]

Sandy,

Does your Pro allow you to scan in DT format?

Thank you,
SergeyT.

No, you need Pro II or higher for DT format.

I scan B&W negatives in 8 bit RGB. I then convert to 16 bit RGB, and then to 16 bit grayscale before doing any tonal changes. Works fine.

Sandy

[keith schreiber]

... So Keith could scan a 12X20" negative at the maximum resolution of 2540 spi of his EverSmart scanner, I could scan at 3175 spi with my EverSmart Pro, and if you are lucky enough to own an EverSmart Supreme or Select you could scan at 5400 spi, if you need that kind of huge print.
...
Sandy


At risk of thread drift, but for the sake of clarity, I was using the name EverSmart generically. My scanner is the Pro II model which has a maximum optical resolution of 3175 spi, same as Sandy's Pro. I'm running it with oXYgen 2.3.5 on a G4 MDD using OSX Panther.

I'm not very clear on what the significant differences are between the Pro and the Pro II. Sandy also mentioned that his Pro does not have the ability to scan in DT format. (DT = Digital Transparency - Creo's version of a raw format - basically a 16 bit-per-channel tiff file with no software adjustments applied.) I'd love to discuss the EverSmarts in greater detail, but don't want to hijack this thread, so maybe I'll start a new one soon.

Also, a couple of notes for others who may be interested in the topic of Clay's original post:


The Screen Cezanne has a maximum original size of 13 x 20.9 inches.

A couple of other well regarded drum scanner operators (besides Ian) that I believe have the capability of scanning 12x20 film are James Beck and Lenny Eiger.

~ Keith

[IanMazursky]

The data in the PDF brochure indicates that one can take it to 20" x 28", possibly at up to 8000 dpi (optical). Contra Ian, I'd say that there is nothing ugly about this machine. I'd be all too happy having it sitting in the corner, though I'm not sure how long our old wooden flours would support it. ... If you're able to track one down, together with someone who knows how to use it, then I'm certain it would do what you're after.
Kind regards, Richard

I meant it as a joke, just forgot to add the :D I love my scanners like children, ive even named them :eek:
The fact that someone dreamt this up and had the skills to build it is amazing to me.
The big and little ones are beautiful to me, actually i love all pieces of pre press tech, imagesetters, platesetters...

The Celsis is big, not as big as a Hell scanner but still big. 1300lbs big and they don’t move well.
Ive seen 2 in the last few years that didn’t make it. They tapped something and the top thats hinged got knocked out of alignment.
That rendered them unusable, the lead screw and a few other things were damaged with that small tap.
If you could get a qualified tech to lock it down and transport it, they’re good scanners. The software is old and support has or is drying up.
I could have bought at least 5 over the last 10 years but the space required and the cost to move it made it a poor investment.

Screen scanners were good at the time but now support is almost gone. They made big and small scanners, some good some bad.
I know of a few people who had them replaced by screen a few times for bad boards and faulty optics.
On these big scanners, finding good drums, mounting stations and software is getting harder.
I used to see them all the time on ebay but recently very little. It makes me think that people just threw them out.
After 10-20 years in a heavy production environment a lot of them were not worth repairing. So some of them for sale aren’t in good condition.
They may scan but upon close examination the scans are bad, they may have lines or other artifacts.

Hell scanners are also very good and will last forever. I still know a few people who support them (all of the hell scanners).
The big issue is properly locking them down, getting the special wheel set and moving over a ton of steel and precision optics.

[sanking]

I'm not very clear on what the significant differences are between the Pro and the Pro II. Sandy also mentioned that his Pro does not have the ability to scan in DT format. (DT = Digital Transparency - Creo's version of a raw format - basically a 16 bit-per-channel tiff file with no software adjustments applied.) I'd love to discuss the EverSmarts in greater detail, but don't want to hijack this thread, so maybe I'll start a new one soon.
Keith

Keith,

The Pro and Pro II are identical except for the logic board. The Pro II scans faster because it has a more powerful logic board, and it is possible to scan in DT. If you can believe this, the logic board of the Pro is based on a 298 chip. That takes us back to the early or mid-90s!! Creo used to sell a conversion kit that converted the Pro to Pro II status and allowed use of Firewire. Might still be available but for the price of the conversion kit you could buy a used Eversmart Supreme.

Sandy

[dr5chrome]

6000 for the HOWTEK. 10000 for the newest AZTEK