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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”

#21

Post by aeturnum »

derefr wrote: post #17

Naive question incoming: Does a good modern camera with a macro lens, shooting from a few inches away, have a higher effective DPI than this scanner? If so, is the only problem trying to get a predictable, smooth grid of pictures from such a camera to stitch together? And if so, couldn't you just stick the camera to... a CNC machine, say? Is that not a thing?

Sure? Maybe? Do you have a working setup?

When you get down to it - a scanner is "just" a really specific digital camera with a film holder. The problem is that quality is more about setting up the entire system consistently (film aligned on the scanning camera focal plane correctly, can shift from frame to frame, etc). As with all photographic setups, the chain is only as good as its weakest link.

It is probably possible for any single person to build, through sufficient time and effort, a "better" scanner than any model manufactured - but once you are spending that much time and effort on it you've "lost the plot" of the whole effort.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#23

Post by rasz »

1. old software - For 5-15K hardware keeping dedicated $100 2007 iMac is a non issue. No need to upgrade when it does what its supposed to do.

2. "3,000 Euro repair bill" “The problem is when the FireWire port dies the only repair that is ever proven to be effective has been to replace the entire main board.” is BS from repair company. Where do they get the replacement boards from? answer is they dont, they fix it by replacing $1 component and charging for knowledge and rarity. You are paying for secret knowledge of where to hit the machine with hammer. Hasselblad neither manufactures chips nor ordered custom Firewire controller just for this very niche product. Someone like STS Telecom (https://www.ststele.com https://www.youtube.com/@ststele/videos) or iPad Rehab (https://www.ipadrehab.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@JessaJones/videos) will be able to do the repair at reasonable (compared to $3K) cost without overcharging for working on rare professional photography hardware. As a bonus they will happily publish reverse engineering results so others can also repair their scanners in the future. The issue might be as trivial and simple as bad capacitors in need of a recap, this is 15 year old hardware after all.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#24

Post by bambax »

Not exactly relevant for hi-def pro photography, but if you're struggling to scan paper photos, and you can't find a proper scanner, a hybrid solution that kind of works is to take a low-res scan (using any tech, even a phone) and enhance the result / augment the resolution using some kind of AI software suite or online SaaS.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#25

Post by derefr »

aeturnum wrote: post #21
derefr wrote: post #17

Naive question incoming: Does a good modern camera with a macro lens, shooting from a few inches away, have a higher effective DPI than this scanner? If so, is the only problem trying to get a predictable, smooth grid of pictures from such a camera to stitch together? And if so, couldn't you just stick the camera to... a CNC machine, say? Is that not a thing?

Sure? Maybe? Do you have a working setup? When you get down to it - a scanner is "just" a really specific digital camera with a film holder. The problem is that quality is more about setting up the entire system consistently (film aligned on the scanning camera focal plane correctly, can shift from frame to frame, etc). As with all photographic setups, the chain is only as good as its weakest link. It is probably pos…

I guess what I would naively expect to exist here, is some kind of "kit" for turning a DSLR into a 2D flatbed raster scanner, in the vein of the Pi-based emulation portable "kits" — i.e. "here's a box with all the mechanical and structural stuff, flat-packed with foolproof assembly mechanisms that guarantee rigidity; just bring-your-own expensive electronic bit to slot into it, and watch it go." Where in this case the "expensive electronic bit" is the DSLR — probably with a Wiki-maintained list of known-compatible camera bodies + lenses.

If such a kit existed, the "sufficient time and effort" would amount to maybe five hours and $500. It'd basically be the same hardware + electronics as a cheap 3D printer — just without the need for one of the axes. (Mind you, that's presuming all the imaging is flowing directly from the camera to software on your computer, without any electronics in the device MITMing the signal to do computational photography stuff. If it needed to stitch the photos itself, it'd be a lot more expensive.)

Enough people seem to both have this exact problem, and have the ingenuity to be the one person who produces the kit to scratch their own itch but also the itch of everyone else in the community from then-on, that I would be somewhat surprised if at least an attempt at such a kit didn't already exist.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#26

Post by Const-me »

I also have an old Mustek scanner with outdated drivers, with no hardware issues.

Luckily, my scanner is USB, and VMware Workstation allows to forward complete USB devices to a guest OS. When I need to scan something, I fire up a virtual machine with 32-bits Windows XP inside, with OG drivers, and scanning software.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#27

Post by bombcar »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10
bombcar wrote: 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…

Yeah, and it does happen (rarely) - the best way to get it to happen that I've seen is to have a major customer ask for it. So instead of normal users asking, have Ford ask for a guarantee that X years after maintenance ends, the portions of the code that can be GPL will be, or something.

Even then it's rare to work, but it sometimes can.

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#28

Post by aeturnum »

derefr wrote: post #25
aeturnum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure? Maybe? Do you have a working setup? When you get down to it - a scanner is "just" a really specific digital camera with a film holder. The problem is that quality is more about setting up the entire system consistently (film aligned on the scanning camera focal plane correctly, can shift from frame to frame, etc). As with all photographic setups, the chain is only as good as its weakest link. It is probably pos…

I guess what I would naively expect to exist here, is some kind of "kit" for turning a DSLR into a 2D flatbed raster scanner, in the vein of the Pi-based emulation portable "kits" — i.e. "here's a box with all the mechanical and structural stuff, flat-packed with foolproof assembly mechanisms that guarantee rigidity; just bring-your-own expensive electronic bit to slot into it, and watch it go." Where in this case th…

I mean, I agree that such a kit would be hugely popular and useful. You just don't understand how hard the problem is. There's a reason that people pay thousands of dollars for twenty year old hardware.

> I would be somewhat surprised if at least an attempt at such a kit didn't already exist.

Oh there are lots of attempts!

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#29

Post by derefr »

aeturnum wrote: post #28
derefr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what I would naively expect to exist here, is some kind of "kit" for turning a DSLR into a 2D flatbed raster scanner, in the vein of the Pi-based emulation portable "kits" — i.e. "here's a box with all the mechanical and structural stuff, flat-packed with foolproof assembly mechanisms that guarantee rigidity; just bring-your-own expensive electronic bit to slot into it, and watch it go." Where in this case th…

I mean, I agree that such a kit would be hugely popular and useful. You just don't understand how hard the problem is. There's a reason that people pay thousands of dollars for twenty year old hardware. > I would be somewhat surprised if at least an attempt at such a kit didn't already exist. Oh there are lots of attempts!

Do you expect that an existing mid-tier consumer 3D printer company could make such a kit (with sufficient quality to be useful) as a byproduct of their 3D-printer production line — the same way that iRobot makes "robotics platforms" that are just Roomba vacuums, minus the vacuum mechanism, plus an SDK?

If so, would it be a good idea to go bug one of the 3D printer companies — most likely, one of the ones that frequently pumps out new models to address the problems customers complained about in previous models — to try doing this?

Re: Responses to “I Almost Bought a Scanner”

#30

Post by xeromal »

https://epson.com/fastfoto-photo-document-scanner

If anyone needs to scan through bulk printed photos, I used this device to scan all my mom's stored photos for her wedding gift. I scanned over 12,000 photos over hte course of a few months so I couldn't bother with raising a lid. This thing makes short work of 20-30 photos per batch and it does a great job at scanning them. I host a small pikapod that has them tagged by a rudimentary AI for their faces and other objects. It was a fun little project and warmed my heart.

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