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Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

leejo.github.io

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Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#2
I assume the author knows their stuff about why consumer scanners aren’t good enough, particularly around dynamic range. However, for black and white film, I’m generally able to make out the crystal grain on 35mm with my consumer scanner and included tray, so I don’t know what more there is to resolve.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#3

I assume the author knows their stuff about why consumer scanners aren’t good enough, particularly around dynamic range. However, for black and white film, I’m generally able to make out the crystal grain on 35mm with my consumer scanner and included tray, so I don’t know what more there is to resolve.

I used to own the scan he is talking about and various epson scanner, you cannot imagine the difference, Epson is fine and you are happy with it, then you see what an Hasselblad scanner can do for the same negative and for the rest of yout life you will think that Epsons are garbage.

I "used" to own it because it had some small hardware problems and i was unable to fix it or find someone who could repair it. I bought a digital back and never did film photography since.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#4
post #3

I assume the author knows their stuff about why consumer scanners aren’t good enough, particularly around dynamic range. However, for black and white film, I’m generally able to make out the crystal grain on 35mm with my consumer scanner and included tray, so I don’t know what more there is to resolve.

I used to own the scan he is talking about and various epson scanner, you cannot imagine the difference, Epson is fine and you are happy with it, then you see what an Hasselblad scanner can do for the same negative and for the rest of yout life you will think that Epsons are garbage. I "used" to own it because it had some small hardware problems and i was unable to fix it or find someone who could repair it. I bought…

Bouncing on that last bit: do you find digital to match/exceed your experience of film+hasselblad?

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#7
post #3

I assume the author knows their stuff about why consumer scanners aren’t good enough, particularly around dynamic range. However, for black and white film, I’m generally able to make out the crystal grain on 35mm with my consumer scanner and included tray, so I don’t know what more there is to resolve.

I used to own the scan he is talking about and various epson scanner, you cannot imagine the difference, Epson is fine and you are happy with it, then you see what an Hasselblad scanner can do for the same negative and for the rest of yout life you will think that Epsons are garbage. I "used" to own it because it had some small hardware problems and i was unable to fix it or find someone who could repair it. I bought…

What is a "digital back"?

Edit: Wow! Thanks for all your replies! This sounds intriguing, but only tangentially related to scanning.

Now if you could turn a film camera into a high-quality scanner.. wouldn't that be something :)

I'm in the ignorant camp where I've been satisfied with Epson consumer grade scanners because I had no idea what I was missing.

Cheers.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#9
post #7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to own the scan he is talking about and various epson scanner, you cannot imagine the difference, Epson is fine and you are happy with it, then you see what an Hasselblad scanner can do for the same negative and for the rest of yout life you will think that Epsons are garbage. I "used" to own it because it had some small hardware problems and i was unable to fix it or find someone who could repair it. I bought…

What is a "digital back"? Edit: Wow! Thanks for all your replies! This sounds intriguing, but only tangentially related to scanning. Now if you could turn a film camera into a high-quality scanner.. wouldn't that be something :) I'm in the ignorant camp where I've been satisfied with Epson consumer grade scanners because I had no idea what I was missing. Cheers.

I think in some film cameras, you can replace the part of the camera where film is exposed with a digital image sensor. Then you can use the same camera, but instead of exposing chemical-based film, you're recording digital images.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#10
post #6

Often commercial software has tons of closed-source libraries that they don’t have the source code to. Even Doom had that when opensourced. It’s an annoying headache for a company to open source even for a project no longer in development.

They could still release what they do have. Depending on the nature of the missing bits, the community sometimes can replace or shim out chunks of proprietary code and still have an easier time than replacing the whole thing. Or, depending on the licenses involved, it can be possible to at least release object files so people can edit the core code then link against closed libraries to build the final library. That's what happened with OpenSolaris - Sun released most of the OS as open source, but couldn't relicense some chunks, so they released a bunch of blobs that had to be injected into the build to create the final product; AFAIK some of these persist as annoying blobs to this day, but some were replaced piecemeal by illumos with FOSS versions.

(Obviously, this is very dependent on how much lifting is done by what parts and how specialized they are; if you happen to use a closed zip library, that's easy for the community to work around, whereas if your app is a thin wrapper around another closed library then maybe opening it really is minimally useful)

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