I would reach out to one of these 3rd party companies with one of these scanners and just talk to somebody. Even better if you can find one locally to talk to someone personally. If they are a large corporation with evilCorpOverlords, move to the next one to see if you can find a smaller company. Just talk about your project with them. I would be shocked if you didn't find some like minded person that would be willing to help get the scans done for you.
I worked for large post facilities that would most definitely have told you to pound sand. I've also worked for smaller facilities that used the same equipment. We frequently would take on projects like this, especially if we were slow. It made those boring times in between projects much more interesting. Sometimes there was also something we learned in the process that made us even more experience for future projects. I've pushed to accept some of these jobs personally.
At the end of the day, what's the worst that could happen from the conversation? They say no? Volunteer to come in and work with it yourself during off times or other types of ideas. Show them your passion for it, and get them excited for your project. You'll be amazed at what the community will do for others.
I reached out to a few people over a couple of months while testing the scanner, including a couple of third party service/repair shops. There are also dedicated user groups around these scanners that are all happy to help and give tips. They were extremely helpful but the conclusion was indeed that the Firewire port or main board is on the way out.
It is possible to fix it, and the third party service/repair shops do have the parts and expertise (some of them are former Hasselblad service employees). The problem is the cost. To quote: "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. I currently have sufficient parts to replace this should you wish. The price to completely refurbish the scanner and replace the main board is 2800+ VAT "
So 5,000 Euro for the scanner then 3,500 Euro for the service/repair. That's a little bit more than I'm willing to drop on this project, especially given the other factors - it might need repair/service again in 12months time, the discontinued software and needing old OS/computers to run it.
you'd be surprised at how accomodating and chill people are in Switzerland (the writer mentions living there).
i needed a couple prints for a birthday and my local shop was closed, so i went to a business that printed ads, banners, fliers, etc with incredibly expensive professional xerox printers. they printed what i needed, had me pay a fair price (less than the shop), and let me use their facilities for cutting/finishes.
Through various driver discs and archived files online I was able to compile some resources and threw them up on Archive.org (available on the FlexColor page of my site).
> That’s 2500 to 7500.- CHF worth of scans if I get a third party to do it.
This is how I ended up with my first laser printer.
My aunt was asked to publish a limited edition of a book she translated to German. The printer wanted a ~1000 dpi film and we got quotes on how much it'd cost to get the protolith done. We then concluded a good laser printer that could print on transparencies would be far cheaper and fit our budget, so we asked if that would work for the printer. When they said it would, we got the printer, I tweaked the halftoning a bit and off we went.
In the end, the German translation we did was perceivably better quality than the professionally typeset Portuguese version. And I got a nice laser printer.
I know a few students who bought those big business lasers and 3rd party toner to print pirated textbooks. This was before good tablets with stylus support were commonplace. Several books would already pay for the machine.
I would advise the author to just buy the scanner, use it to scan everything, then sell it on. If you make a loss on resale, just consider it the cost of renting a very high quality scanner, but of course there's a significant chance you'll make a profit.
this is good advice. I've done it with everything from weird machine tools (tool and cutter grinder) to woodworking tools to snowboards to guitars. if you don't treat big purchases as permanent, you'd be amazed at what money you can make and what items you can use and enjoy for just the opportunity cost of your capital.
In most cases yes, but the author said this one was showing signs of the firewire port failing. If it dies in your hands that really sucks financially.
> The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit architecture and hasn’t been updated in well over 10 years
Might be worth it to try using Wine to run the windows software if they have windows drivers. Wine should run on mac if that's your poison.
> It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad after about a decade. If that happens you’re looking at a 3,000 Euro repair bill
A soldering iron is cheap, and so are firewire ports on digikey. I doubt they invented their own proprietary firewire connection. Ferrari's use volvo parts, you can probably fix it for like $3.
Does userland driver software, which probably wants to make all sorts of weird syscalls to communicate with hardware, tend to actually work under Wine?
The state of dedicated film scanning is so bad these days, especially for larger than 35mm formats that it seems most people still shooting film are resorting to using a digital camera and a macro lens with something to hold the film.
> It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad after about a decade. If that happens you’re looking at a 3,000 Euro repair bill if you can find someone with the parts capable of replacing them. Hasselblad will still repair them but it’s a pain to get the scanner to them and they charge almost twice as much as third part service shops.
...
> This thing is remarkable. The bigger brother (the X5) even more so. Imacon/Hasselblad had a load of patents on the technology that means no other manufacturer can replicate it. There are other high spec scanning solutions, of course, but none that come close to this form factor.
...
> 15 years passed, at which point Hasselblad discontinued the scanners. The cost of modernising the interfaces was not worth it. In fact, only 7 years passed before Hasselblad effectively discontinued them as that was when they stopped updating the software.
This is the dark side of patents.
A company that has used the patent system to run everyone else out of business despite not being particularly innovative (the author describes a "simple" system for assuring the film is perfectly flat), refuses to keep their product line up-to-date or properly support it, charges a fortune for a service that from the sounds of it doesn't actually fix the problem with the interfaces, which may have been purposefully designed to fail anyway...and an entire market segment just dies.
It's sad that those $3000 bills for repair will probably be going to organizations like museums trying to preserve their collections or make them more accessible. Or be unaffordable to such organizations.
Yep, I deal with this all the time in industrial automation. It's even worse than the consumer space there, because the cost of breaking stuff is so high that the default is to invent something and then coast on your laurels for a few decades. Infrastructure and tooling that somebody's dad bought 30 years ago is now too expensive to update, so you keep it limping along well past its normal service life...
In particular, the author laments the high cost of scans:
> Here in Switzerland I am looking at a cost of around 30.- CHF a frame minimum if I get a third party to scan them for me.
And worries that you have to have something like the 2007 iMac to run it:
> So you need a dedicated old rig to run the proprietary software to drive the scanner.
But doesn't seem to quite connect 2 and 2 together: Those third party shops all have ancient dedicated rigs that they bought a decade or two ago. The use of that equipment is what your $30 per scan is buying! There are label printers and laser markers and time clocks and press brakes and CNCs and inventory management systems at shops all over the world, running some PLC RTOS from the 90s, or DOS or Windows 98 with PXI cards or printer parallel ports or even completely proprietary logic boards, that are decades old and you can't get parts or service or updates for them.
It's ubiquitous in any less profitable industries that aren't on the cutting edge.
It's hard to maintain and gradually update this equipment. I fear it's going to get harder as IIoT services die off and engineered lifetimes shrink. It's hard to debug a machine built before the Internet, with coffee-stained schematics and only enough IDE hard drive space for 8-character variable names, but I worry it will be harder still to debug a machine built well after the Internet with ubiquitous documentation available only behind a login to a server that's no longer online and enough hard drive space for gigabytes of third-party libraries...
They might have a patent on this particular setup, but the FlexTight system produces worse results compared to traditional drum scanning. Due to the way it uses a lens between the CCD sensor and the drum also means that you get some quality issues around the edges of larger frames. It also means you can't scan large formats like 8x10. It's cool tech and it is a shame that it's stuck behind patents, but it's not like there's not other options out there.
Also the hardware is funny. IIRC they didn't iterate on the actual components much, and the move to FireWire basically just integrated a SCSI->FireWire adapter into the case. I haven't seen the inside of an X1/X5, but I'd be interested if these could be repaired by using a different SCSI adapter of some type.
I don't know anything about scanning film, but perhaps a microscope scanner could be used to do that? 8000ppi is nothing for those, there you're looking at ~10 pixels per micron (see
https://cancer.digitalslidearchive.org/#!/CDSA/acc/TCGA-OR-A...
). If you can fix the film somehow to a pathology glass slide (75x26mm) you could load 100s in the machine and have it scanned overnight. It will be multiple GBs per slide though.
They do cost about 2x-20x as much but they are fairly ubiquitous in research hospitals or universities. Some (like Philips) also have annoying software so people are getting rid of them for cheap
I spent months scanning about 2500 family negatives and slides on an Epson Perfection V600 photo scanner.
While it's no FlexTight, I am happy with the results, especially because I had no plans to crop.
In hindsight, I wished I had used SilverFast rather than the Epson scanning software. SilverFast offers Multi-Exposure which does two scans for maximum dynamic range and then merges them into one.
Also, the Epson default film holders have no ability to flatten the film strips so I probably ended up with softer images in many cases. I believe there are 3rd party adapters that address this.
The V600 is better than most and has a CCD sensor instead of an inferior CIS, but the limiting factor is the optics. The V700/V750/V800/V850 have proper lenses.
The old-school way to scan film is to lay the film directly on glass with a thin layer of mineral oil. Works terrific for medium and large format. We used to do this for drum scanners.
I also use an Epson Perfection (V750 Photo). These machines produce very good results if you are careful with film positioning. I still haven't figured out a way to scan really old negatives in rolls: despite buying several magic holders, I've yet to find one that can oppose the force of a nearly 80-year old film roll.
I would not recommend third-party software, though. The problem with scanner software is that every developer seems to think that I have unlimited time to tweak the settings for every scan, and that scanning those 5 negatives is my only job for the next month. That might be the case for some people, but trust me, if you're looking at several thousand scans, you do not want to tweak each one individually. You want software that works with you. And so far every third party program I tried did not have this approach.
I have the same scanner. Would you mind sharing your setup? I've only used mine for flat-bed document scanning, but do have a bunch of old family slides.
+1 for a cool title, and great choice of a camera. I once used a friend's Hasselblad in the Scottish highlands, and the photo looked almost nicer than reality.
A refusal to share the source code of a driver in the 1970s (on the side of Xerox Corp.) angered RMS enough back then to start the Free Software Foundation, and the rest is history, after all. So let's see what your solution will be...
What you could do is buy the scanner and after your project offer others to scan their slides to get some of the money back. Or team up with others and split the cost of the scanner upfront (this latter scheme requires someone to hold the physical device, I think donating it to a library after the project would be a fair mechanism, so each party - and others - can still use it later).
I wonder if the company would be willing to grant a patent license to an open hardware version of the scanner. They’re not manufacturing them anymore, nobody else seems interested in making the damn things… let it go.
Sounds like maintaining these high end medium format cameras and scanners can be a real hassel.
I have a Nikon Coolscan V and nothing is wrong with it but the switch, but it’s hardly worth repairing or trying to sell on eBay. Working, it might be worth more than I paid for in c2005.
I used to work in a photo studio in Germany, we had 2 of these and the predecessor to the Hasselblad/Imacon X1. The difference between them was amazing. I'd still love to have one of those Coolscan 9000s, they are great machines. Even back then (around 2004) we used Vuescan for the Nikons. It was already an issue to get up to date drivers for our Macs.
I have a bunch of 120 film that I'd like to get better scans of someday. The old Flextight scanners were on my radar, as well as the Coolscan 9000. I still wonder what the best way to scan these old negatives is. I have some scans done with one of the Epson flatbeds, but they're limited in what you can get out of them. I've also taken some shots to get drum scanned, which gives fantastic results, but isn't justifiable given the quantity of film I want to scan.
I've considered trying to get an old drum scanner and learning to do it myself but it would require some dedicated space which I don't have right now.
A lot of these shots were taken carefully, with good exposure, on a tripod, good focus, correct aperture, and slow film (by modern standards). There's an enormous amount of detail in some of these negatives which just doesn't show up in most scans. On optical prints I can even count the stitches in people's clothing from full-body portraits, if I look at the print with a loupe.
I had hoped that film scanners would get cheaper as time went on, and some day I would just be able to buy a nice scanner and just plow through my film. Seems like my best hope is for somebody to make a jig where I can connect a digital camera and use that as a makeshift scanner--I know these jigs exist, but MF film is still a bit of a beast.
I’m helping my dad with a SciTex scanner – I think it’s a SciTex EverSmart Supreme? It’s a similar proposition in many ways as far as I know. High-end professional equipment from the golden age of digital prepress. Firewire is involved. Will essentially only run on old Macs. With the SciTex scanners I believe a PowerPC Mac is a requirement in practice.
From reading the post, the biggest issue with these Hasselblad scanners is of course the scanner mainboard, and I assume the same is true of the Scitexes.
A smaller problem is needing to have old Macs around. Regarding that, I am now curious if SCSI/Firewire controller passthrough into a VM can help. In the same way that recent PC hardware can pass a PCI-Express GPU into a virtualized macOS guest. MacOS VMs in qemu-kvm on recent Linux kernels running on IOMMU-enabled hardware affords a lot of control and compatibility – the guest OS gets direct control of a physical PCI-Express device, and it works.
Doesn’t solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of course. And doesn’t completely solve the old-mac-hardware problem on the other side either. But it might reduce the hardware dependency on the Mac side into just a SCSI or Firewire controller card instead of a whole old Mac.
Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to give any hints about it?
And/or can I be useful in any way? Have set up macOS VMs with physical GPU passthrough and have working prepress experience with Macs ranging back to a Macintosh Plus :)
The post as it is is already immensely valuable insight into the whole ancient-prehistoric-digital-prepress world my father and I sometimes burrow a little into – many thanks!
You are actually on the money. We do this at my company. With much more challenging scanners than the Flextight. We've virtualised the Fujifilm SP3000 this was as well the the Noritsu S-1700 (which is a rarer precursor to the HS-1800 with very similar specs).
> Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and refuse to open source it to allow others to do that.
Hasselblad are idiots then.
You could try to find more owners of that hardware and chip up together to hire a reverse-engineer to make an open source driver. Compared with the cost of hardware and complexity of using old computers to interact with it, it should be negligible.
While this is not one of the 7200 scanners claimed by VueScan[1], it might be worth talking to those folks. With their experience they might be able to reverse-engineer the protocol.
If not (and I'm sure this is not an acceptable idea to a purist like OP) I would consider using a good consumer-grade scanner and post-process with Topaz AI[2], which produces absolutely astonishing results in my experience. Yes, maybe it is inventing the pixels it adds, but they look like the right pixels nonetheless.
I had a Nikon Super Coolscan 9000ED that I ended up selling off and still have my CoolScan 5000ED with the slide and strip film autofeeder when I finally get around to scanning my father's old slides and negatives in my copious spare time™. The 9000 could scan a X-Pan slide in a single pass, the 5000ED in two scans with stitching. I had dedicated a first-generation MacBook Pro to run the software as they had a FireWire port, using BootCamp to run Windows on it as the Windows version of Nikon Scan was more stable.
Almost all the proper film scanners were discontinued around 2010, that the Flextight series survived another decade is amazing, but Imacon bought Hasselblad (not the other way around) and now DJI has bought the combined entity, and obviously has no interest in the legacy of film.
So someone needs to get the idea into their heads that lugging medium-format cameras around would be the perfect excuse why people need to buy larger and more expensive drones
Brought back “Fond” memories of my Polaroid Sprintscan 120 (4000dpi) [0] which could handle negs of up to 6x9 size. It was a slow, noisy beast, but gave great scans.
Around the turn of the century I used it thousands of 120 film (6x6cm) negatives shot from my beautiful 1980s Plaubel Makina 67.
I’ve often thought of resuscitating the camera from its pelican box sarcophagus but the idea of scanning the negatives gives me chills.
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
I worked for large post facilities that would most definitely have told you to pound sand. I've also worked for smaller facilities that used the same equipment. We frequently would take on projects like this, especially if we were slow. It made those boring times in between projects much more interesting. Sometimes there was also something we learned in the process that made us even more experience for future projects. I've pushed to accept some of these jobs personally.
At the end of the day, what's the worst that could happen from the conversation? They say no? Volunteer to come in and work with it yourself during off times or other types of ideas. Show them your passion for it, and get them excited for your project. You'll be amazed at what the community will do for others.
[+] [-] leejo|3 years ago|reply
It is possible to fix it, and the third party service/repair shops do have the parts and expertise (some of them are former Hasselblad service employees). The problem is the cost. To quote: "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. I currently have sufficient parts to replace this should you wish. The price to completely refurbish the scanner and replace the main board is 2800+ VAT "
So 5,000 Euro for the scanner then 3,500 Euro for the service/repair. That's a little bit more than I'm willing to drop on this project, especially given the other factors - it might need repair/service again in 12months time, the discontinued software and needing old OS/computers to run it.
[+] [-] dotsynergy_it|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pathartl|3 years ago|reply
Through various driver discs and archived files online I was able to compile some resources and threw them up on Archive.org (available on the FlexColor page of my site).
Let me know if you have any questions!
[+] [-] Wistar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltarholamda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|3 years ago|reply
This is how I ended up with my first laser printer.
My aunt was asked to publish a limited edition of a book she translated to German. The printer wanted a ~1000 dpi film and we got quotes on how much it'd cost to get the protolith done. We then concluded a good laser printer that could print on transparencies would be far cheaper and fit our budget, so we asked if that would work for the printer. When they said it would, we got the printer, I tweaked the halftoning a bit and off we went.
In the end, the German translation we did was perceivably better quality than the professionally typeset Portuguese version. And I got a nice laser printer.
[+] [-] m463|3 years ago|reply
Get someone to do it, or DIY but get a cool tool out of it?
That's how you end up with things like film scanners, or pole saws, or portable battery-powered staple guns for electric wiring.
Just try not to have a cool tool + procrastination.
[+] [-] moremore221|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyclotron3k|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abakker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maxburn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Topgamer7|3 years ago|reply
Might be worth it to try using Wine to run the windows software if they have windows drivers. Wine should run on mac if that's your poison.
> It seems the Firewire ports on these things start to go bad after about a decade. If that happens you’re looking at a 3,000 Euro repair bill
A soldering iron is cheap, and so are firewire ports on digikey. I doubt they invented their own proprietary firewire connection. Ferrari's use volvo parts, you can probably fix it for like $3.
[+] [-] valleyer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somehnguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hbossy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lytfyre|3 years ago|reply
Seems a pity.
[+] [-] KennyBlanken|3 years ago|reply
...
> This thing is remarkable. The bigger brother (the X5) even more so. Imacon/Hasselblad had a load of patents on the technology that means no other manufacturer can replicate it. There are other high spec scanning solutions, of course, but none that come close to this form factor.
...
> 15 years passed, at which point Hasselblad discontinued the scanners. The cost of modernising the interfaces was not worth it. In fact, only 7 years passed before Hasselblad effectively discontinued them as that was when they stopped updating the software.
This is the dark side of patents.
A company that has used the patent system to run everyone else out of business despite not being particularly innovative (the author describes a "simple" system for assuring the film is perfectly flat), refuses to keep their product line up-to-date or properly support it, charges a fortune for a service that from the sounds of it doesn't actually fix the problem with the interfaces, which may have been purposefully designed to fail anyway...and an entire market segment just dies.
It's sad that those $3000 bills for repair will probably be going to organizations like museums trying to preserve their collections or make them more accessible. Or be unaffordable to such organizations.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|3 years ago|reply
In particular, the author laments the high cost of scans:
> Here in Switzerland I am looking at a cost of around 30.- CHF a frame minimum if I get a third party to scan them for me.
And worries that you have to have something like the 2007 iMac to run it:
> So you need a dedicated old rig to run the proprietary software to drive the scanner.
But doesn't seem to quite connect 2 and 2 together: Those third party shops all have ancient dedicated rigs that they bought a decade or two ago. The use of that equipment is what your $30 per scan is buying! There are label printers and laser markers and time clocks and press brakes and CNCs and inventory management systems at shops all over the world, running some PLC RTOS from the 90s, or DOS or Windows 98 with PXI cards or printer parallel ports or even completely proprietary logic boards, that are decades old and you can't get parts or service or updates for them.
It's ubiquitous in any less profitable industries that aren't on the cutting edge.
It's hard to maintain and gradually update this equipment. I fear it's going to get harder as IIoT services die off and engineered lifetimes shrink. It's hard to debug a machine built before the Internet, with coffee-stained schematics and only enough IDE hard drive space for 8-character variable names, but I worry it will be harder still to debug a machine built well after the Internet with ubiquitous documentation available only behind a login to a server that's no longer online and enough hard drive space for gigabytes of third-party libraries...
[+] [-] pathartl|3 years ago|reply
Also the hardware is funny. IIRC they didn't iterate on the actual components much, and the move to FireWire basically just integrated a SCSI->FireWire adapter into the case. I haven't seen the inside of an X1/X5, but I'd be interested if these could be repaired by using a different SCSI adapter of some type.
[+] [-] yread|3 years ago|reply
They do cost about 2x-20x as much but they are fairly ubiquitous in research hospitals or universities. Some (like Philips) also have annoying software so people are getting rid of them for cheap
[+] [-] b112|3 years ago|reply
What a shock. Wish I knew what internal culture/decision making process, lead Philips to such horrid everything software.
It's a teaching moment for others.
[+] [-] spython|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sys32768|3 years ago|reply
While it's no FlexTight, I am happy with the results, especially because I had no plans to crop.
In hindsight, I wished I had used SilverFast rather than the Epson scanning software. SilverFast offers Multi-Exposure which does two scans for maximum dynamic range and then merges them into one.
Also, the Epson default film holders have no ability to flatten the film strips so I probably ended up with softer images in many cases. I believe there are 3rd party adapters that address this.
[+] [-] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codpiece|3 years ago|reply
https://www.analogfilm.camera/scanning/deciding-when-to-wet-...
[+] [-] jwr|3 years ago|reply
I would not recommend third-party software, though. The problem with scanner software is that every developer seems to think that I have unlimited time to tweak the settings for every scan, and that scanning those 5 negatives is my only job for the next month. That might be the case for some people, but trust me, if you're looking at several thousand scans, you do not want to tweak each one individually. You want software that works with you. And so far every third party program I tried did not have this approach.
[+] [-] tlavoie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jll29|3 years ago|reply
A refusal to share the source code of a driver in the 1970s (on the side of Xerox Corp.) angered RMS enough back then to start the Free Software Foundation, and the rest is history, after all. So let's see what your solution will be...
What you could do is buy the scanner and after your project offer others to scan their slides to get some of the money back. Or team up with others and split the cost of the scanner upfront (this latter scheme requires someone to hold the physical device, I think donating it to a library after the project would be a fair mechanism, so each party - and others - can still use it later).
[+] [-] pbronez|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elahieh|3 years ago|reply
I have a Nikon Coolscan V and nothing is wrong with it but the switch, but it’s hardly worth repairing or trying to sell on eBay. Working, it might be worth more than I paid for in c2005.
[+] [-] robocat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
That's supported by VueScan[1].
[0] https://www.filmscanner.info/en/NikonSuperCoolscan9000ED.htm...
[1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#...
[+] [-] keithbingman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] therein|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zetobal|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.michaelstricklandimages.com/blog/2018/4/4/drum-s...
[+] [-] maz29|3 years ago|reply
https://apps.apple.com/tt/app/auction-watch-ebay-alerts/id16...
[+] [-] codpiece|3 years ago|reply
I would love to get my hands on an old commercial stat camera as well. And a barn to house all of this stuff in.
[+] [-] buildbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dietrichepp|3 years ago|reply
I've considered trying to get an old drum scanner and learning to do it myself but it would require some dedicated space which I don't have right now.
A lot of these shots were taken carefully, with good exposure, on a tripod, good focus, correct aperture, and slow film (by modern standards). There's an enormous amount of detail in some of these negatives which just doesn't show up in most scans. On optical prints I can even count the stitches in people's clothing from full-body portraits, if I look at the print with a loupe.
I had hoped that film scanners would get cheaper as time went on, and some day I would just be able to buy a nice scanner and just plow through my film. Seems like my best hope is for somebody to make a jig where I can connect a digital camera and use that as a makeshift scanner--I know these jigs exist, but MF film is still a bit of a beast.
[+] [-] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|3 years ago|reply
I’m helping my dad with a SciTex scanner – I think it’s a SciTex EverSmart Supreme? It’s a similar proposition in many ways as far as I know. High-end professional equipment from the golden age of digital prepress. Firewire is involved. Will essentially only run on old Macs. With the SciTex scanners I believe a PowerPC Mac is a requirement in practice.
From reading the post, the biggest issue with these Hasselblad scanners is of course the scanner mainboard, and I assume the same is true of the Scitexes.
A smaller problem is needing to have old Macs around. Regarding that, I am now curious if SCSI/Firewire controller passthrough into a VM can help. In the same way that recent PC hardware can pass a PCI-Express GPU into a virtualized macOS guest. MacOS VMs in qemu-kvm on recent Linux kernels running on IOMMU-enabled hardware affords a lot of control and compatibility – the guest OS gets direct control of a physical PCI-Express device, and it works.
Doesn’t solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of course. And doesn’t completely solve the old-mac-hardware problem on the other side either. But it might reduce the hardware dependency on the Mac side into just a SCSI or Firewire controller card instead of a whole old Mac.
Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to give any hints about it?
And/or can I be useful in any way? Have set up macOS VMs with physical GPU passthrough and have working prepress experience with Macs ranging back to a Macintosh Plus :)
The post as it is is already immensely valuable insight into the whole ancient-prehistoric-digital-prepress world my father and I sometimes burrow a little into – many thanks!
[+] [-] bxs24p|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|3 years ago|reply
Hasselblad are idiots then.
You could try to find more owners of that hardware and chip up together to hire a reverse-engineer to make an open source driver. Compared with the cost of hardware and complexity of using old computers to interact with it, it should be negligible.
[+] [-] fauxreb|3 years ago|reply
Some great concept digital cameras (and digital mounts), but they've probably forgotten how the mirror worked.
[+] [-] fernly|3 years ago|reply
If not (and I'm sure this is not an acceptable idea to a purist like OP) I would consider using a good consumer-grade scanner and post-process with Topaz AI[2], which produces absolutely astonishing results in my experience. Yes, maybe it is inventing the pixels it adds, but they look like the right pixels nonetheless.
[1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html
[2] https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai
[+] [-] fmajid|3 years ago|reply
Almost all the proper film scanners were discontinued around 2010, that the Flextight series survived another decade is amazing, but Imacon bought Hasselblad (not the other way around) and now DJI has bought the combined entity, and obviously has no interest in the legacy of film.
[+] [-] detaro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robga|3 years ago|reply
Around the turn of the century I used it thousands of 120 film (6x6cm) negatives shot from my beautiful 1980s Plaubel Makina 67.
I’ve often thought of resuscitating the camera from its pelican box sarcophagus but the idea of scanning the negatives gives me chills.
[0] http://www.photographyreview.com/product/digital-gear/scanne...