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Thread: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

  1. #21
    Pali K Pali K's Avatar
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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    Couldn't agree more with you Ari! The sounds are a very enjoyable part of using this beautiful machines. You should hear a Tango one day as well as it sounds exactly like what you would expect from a high precision german engineered equipment. It's almost like a jet engine firing up and humming after a few seconds.

    Pali

  2. #22
    Unwitting Thread Killer Ari's Avatar
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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    Pali, the beeping is what I like most, very Buck Rogers-y.
    I think they just added those as extra sound effects, for fun.
    Last edited by Ari; 20-Feb-2018 at 13:11.

  3. #23
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    You two are geeksss... I just keep thinking the machine is crashing.

  4. #24

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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    Well a lot of times it IS crashing - but crashing in a controlled way. As in bumping into the so-called Crash Stops that determine the limits of travel. I don't know the details of these particular scanners, but it isn't (or wasn't in the old days when I used to write firmware to control mechanisms) unusual for the machine to lose track of it's location, in which case the firmware would drive the head in one direction until it encountered some resistance - and at that point it would probably back the head away and drive it forward again several times to be sure that it really was at the limit and not just running into a random piece of dirt. Producing a sort of loud rattling sound. Before they had textured "landing zones" or other ways to take the heads of a disk drive off the surface for shutdown. the heads would land on a portion of the disk that had a lubricant coating and sometimes if they sat there long enough capillary action would suck lubricant into the head - disk interface and sort of glue the heads to the disk. At startup they'd have a routine that would try to unstick the heads by banging them hard agains the crash stops and it would make quite a racket while breaking the heads loose. And in a really bad case the heads would stay stuck to the disk and the machine would actually tear the heads off of the suspension arms.
    Last edited by Jim Andrada; 21-Feb-2018 at 22:18.

  5. #25
    Unwitting Thread Killer Ari's Avatar
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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    Quote Originally Posted by Jim Andrada View Post
    Well a lot of times it IS crashing - but crashing in a controlled way. As in bumping into the so-called Crash Stops that determine the limits of travel. I don't know the details of these particular scanners, but it isn't (or wasn't in the old days when I used to write firmware to control mechanisms) for the machine to lose track of it's location, in which case the firmware would drive the head in one direction until it encountered some resistance - and at that point it would probably back the head away and drive it forward again several times to be sure that it really was at the limit and not just running into a random piece of dirt. Producing a sort of loud rattling sound. Before they had textured "landing zones" or other ways to take the heads of a disk drive off the surface for shutdown. the heads would land on a portion of the disk that had a lubricant coating and sometimes if they sat there long enough capillary action would suck lubricant into the head - disk interface and sort of glue the heads to the disk. At startup they's have a routine that would try to unstick the heads by banging them hard agains the crash stops and it would make quite a racket while breaking the heads loose. And in a really bad case the heads would stay stuck to the disk and the machine would actually tear the heads off of the suspension arms.
    Yikes!
    Sounds like the opening scene from a "Terminator" movie.

  6. #26
    sepiareverb's Avatar
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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    I would love to have you able to scan 8x10 Mark. Just packing up that 35mm now, should be headed your way tomorrow.

  7. #27

    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    Quote Originally Posted by sepiareverb View Post
    I would love to have you able to scan 8x10 Mark. Just packing up that 35mm now, should be headed your way tomorrow.
    Sounds good! Thank you! I can scan 8x10 with my Epson V700. It does pretty well, especially if you use a wet mount. But I can't process it at this time so I don't offer it as a service.

  8. #28

    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    I heard back from Michael... He has both the IQSmart3 and the Howtek 4500. Interestingly the Howtek is about $1500 dollars LESS expensive. That makes me wonder which is better for my needs... Is there a quality difference at all between the two?

  9. #29

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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    I haven't made a direct comparison with the Howtek but I doubt there's a day vs night difference. I usually scan anything smaller that 4 x 5 (and sometimes also 4 x 5) at a true optical resolution of 4300.

    There are probably some advantages to the drum scanner re image quality, but the big thing that swung me to the IQsmart was that the workload is a lot simpler/quicker - basically just lay the original on the bed and go - you should probably tape it, but I think Ari has a mask that's cut just a hair larger than 8 x 10 and he just drops the film in place closes the lid, and scans. Wet mounting to the drum is more time consuming and I think the design of the flatbeds make it easier to scan multiple images in a batch.

    So to me the simpler workflow was a bigger consideration than any possible slight quality difference. Why don't you send Michael a negative or two and ask him to scan on each scanner and see what you think? In the end, they're both good scanners. If you're comparing the IQsmart 3 to the Howtek, I suspect you could get higher resolution from the IQsmart.

    By the way I recorded the scanner last night. I'm scanning stuff tonight but hopefully I can post a link to the recording tomorrow.

  10. #30

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    Re: Lab Owner needs Drum Scanner Boot Camp

    I recorded the scanner doing a full board preview. Not sure how your audio levels are set, but it should be about the leel of a normal speaking voice a couple of feet away.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jwrzwxfn7...ounds.wav?dl=0

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