Re: filmscanners: open and control
In a message dated 3/6/01 10:39:50 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Dear Brian But Daquerre's process was a technological dead-end that really had no future and so there was little call to get round it. It was expensive (it used a plate coated in metallic silver), it could only be looked at in certain viewing conditions, and there was no way to produce copies. Talbot's process negative was the one with a future. Anyway the big improvements in photographic processes happened _after_ Talbot's patents expired in the 1860s; the wet plate process, dry plates and finally film. Or you could take the view that so many studios were making big money out of Daguerrotype portraits that they didn't see that it was a blind alley until others had gone the neg/pos route. Talbot's early patents were challenged by alternatives within a couple of years. After unsuccesfully fighting off his rivals Fox Talbot concentrated on reproduction processes, which is what he seemed to have in mind when he first started his experiments. Incidentally Robert Goddard touches on another theory in his novel Into the Light which has a photographer as the central character. The book is set in the present day but flashes back a couple of centuries where a character is based on the mysterious Elizabeth Fulhame who wrote an account of photographic techniques in 1794. Agfa's original colour films also needed to be sent back to the lab for processing. I think it was Ferania who first produced a home-developing colour film, and it was Kodak's 'E process' films that first made it popular. Anyway the great majority of film users still don't do their own processing; they take it to a lab. It is only enthusiasts and some professionals who do their own processing. The general public are just not interested in mucking about with dark rooms and messy chemicals; they just want to point and shoot. Sorry I should have described it as independent labs compared to Kodak owned labs. It was Agfa's ideas that gave us the E process, including the colour coupler in the film not in the process. Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: open and control
In a message dated 6/6/01 6:26:37 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: In most of the world artistic copyright now extends to 70 years after the death of the author. The copyright can be sold or transferred to another person or a company, or passed to the authors descendants but it still only extends to the 70 years after the death of the original author or creator. Copyright on such things as the Coca-Cola trademark goes on for ever, or at least for as long as it is still in use. Brian Rumary, England Dear Brian My bets are that copyright will keep on being extended to equal a period ten to twenty years more than the time since Walt Disney's death. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: open and control
In a message dated 3/6/01 1:38:14 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: So, is Eastman Kodak supposed to be the ideal model for control? If you'd bought their stock in 1920 (or whenever you first could buy stock), you'd be rich now. On the other hand, if you'd bought their cameras, you'd only have some fuzzy-focused negs to show for it! Or you might have suffered the fate of some who bought in 1939-40. Apparently at the outbreak of wartime hostilities several luxury liners sailed for New York with rich Brits fleeing the war in Europe. They took with them large quantities of money against the strict restrictions on foreign exchange. The Americans had suspended dealing in Defence related stocks but Kodak escaped this impost at first. When these people arrived in New York one of the few worthwhile shares they could buy was in Kodak. However the British Government were able to confiscate the shares bought with illegally moved money after making a deal with the US Government. By this means the British taxpayer be came the single biggest shareholder in the Big Yellow Giant. I was told this story by someone who had worked for Kodak in both Harrow and Rochester. Apparently the British Government still held the shares in the mid sixties. They might still. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: open and control
In a message dated 3/6/01 1:50:27 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I thought I read long ago that there was a patent taken out in England a short time before the French government bought the rights to the process and it was the patent that stopped the English using the process. Was it the French who took out the patent to stop the English using the process and did the patent apply in Scotland? Bob Armstrong Dear Bob All my books are packed away pending a move but I vaguely remember that one businessman persuaded Daguerre to take out a British patent. This man then set up a Daguerrotype studio in Holborn in London and made a small fortune because he had bought the sole licence. I don't know about Scotland. Studios were widespread throughout France and made a quick fortune. 400 pounds a day was achieved which was a small fortune in the mid 1800s. Some photographers are not able to charge that now! Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
filmscanners: open and control
In a message dated 2/6/01 4:05:12 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The Open advocates seem to favor freedom (in a product/market sense), and strongly believe that growth and innovation is greater this way than with the Control people's way. They also seem to be less aware of, or concerned with profits, and are more willing to invest their energies based on passion rather than some assurances of payoff. Standards are an anathema. Dear Dick In the earliest days of photography these two ideas fought it out. Daguerre was paid a pension by the French government to make his invention free to everyone, (except the Brits). Fox Talbot on the other hand controlled everything through his rigid patents. The result was that no one tried to circumvent the daguerreotype while lots of inventors tried, and succeeded, in circumventing Talbot's patents. The result was a huge boost to neg/pos photography while Daguerre's ideas stayed in a cul-de-sac. The history of photography seems to be against your hypothesis. Sticking with photography it was Agfa who gave us colour film we could process ourselves while Kodak believed emphatically in the idea of a hugely expensive factory owned Kodachrome line. Which idea is winning now? Kodak also launched the PhotoCD and hasn't yet learnt the value of the home scanner market. Another moral is what happened to Radstock Repro who spent 1.5 million pounds on a closed architecture digital scanner and film output system a few years ago. They promptly went bust when someone had the bright idea of plugging a Mac into existing scanners and invented Photoshop and Quark. 85,000 pounds bought a better, more flexible system which unbelievably did typesetting AS WELL! Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: which space?
Dear Karl As CMYK is a much reduced colour space compared to RGB I would have thought that made it exactly the case. The true test would be to make multiple conversions from RGB to CMYK and back and see if quality suffered, which of course it does. The real test would be to make the conversion several times in different programmes. R=25%, G=15%, B=10% converts to:- QUARK C25 M50 Y65 K64 PAGEMAKER C56 M74 Y83 K65 FREEHANDC75 M85 Y90 PHOTOSHOP C41 M62 Y69 K70 It all depends on your standards. For LVT output you can't even make one CMYK to RGB conversion without noticing adverse quality; for web use you can probably get away with several. In a message dated 26/5/01 8:29:01 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: That's not exactly the case. What is the case is that a particular Hue, Intensity value - what our eyes perceive as a unique 'color value' can be rendered with multiple combinations of RGB. The same is not true for CYMK So when you map from RGB into ANY color space, you essentially lose some information. Namely you lose the mapping back to the original value settings. That doesn't mean you can't get back to an RGB triplet that will look the same, but it does mean that say if you had set the RGB triplet value to Rx,Gy,Bz then mapped to CYMK and you went back, Rx',Gy',Bz' might not have x=x',y=y',z=z'. This matters because you then can't just 'undo' any filtering you did prior to the mapping. Other color spaces have unique tuplet values. This has to do with the fact that in CYMK, intensity is mapped into the gray-scale K, whereas in RGB, intensity is a function of the particulare RGB values. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: FW: filmscanners: What is 4,000 scanner quality like in practice.
In a message dated 25/5/01 1:37:27 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Please forgive the group newbie, but is that $7.50 us for a drum scan and is it considered pricey??? HOLY *#!%!!! I pay $28-$40/scan!!! Am I being taken for a ride? Please if anyone can suggest a less expensive vendor please do so! William Alexander Art Director Leisure Publishing Company 540-989-6138 Dear William Sorry it was english pounds which makes it about $10. Like all things connected to computers the high end stuff is getting more sophisticated too. Drum Scanners like the CGI can put through many more scans per hour than the older scanners like the Crosfield. When I went to the IPEX print show a couple of years ago the CGI was the most expensive scanner there but because of the clever design was capable of much greater productivity. Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: ICG not CGI
In a message dated 25/5/01 7:07:44 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Bob, I think you mean an ICG drum scanner, (at least it is them who have the internal oil drum with no taping), and its actually $35,000. (UK £26,000 new) good machine, as is the Heidelberg Primescan/Tango. Paul Dear Paul I'm sure you are right about the name. The model I saw at IPEX was UK £56,000 plus the drums. For useful throughput it needs two Mac workstations to plug it into, an air conditioned room with positive pressure clean air and a few other expensive bits. Even at the higher price I was given the ICG outperforms all other scanners I saw at IPEX, including the Flextight, on its ability to make a return on the investment the fastest. The ICG did have one early problem. The centrifigal force was not quite enough to flatten older film against the sides of the drum. That has now been solved. Unfortunately I think $26,000 is out of my budget. In fact I know it is. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: What is 4,000 scanner quality like in practice.
Dear Lalle Converting to dollar sums for universal simplicity. UK prices for system time vary between $75 - $125. Apparently New York is slightly cheaper than even the UK provinces. If I get a 120 scanner I will also need a Computer to plug it into, a table to put it on and by many accounts a dust free room. This all costs a lot more than the price of a scanner. When you count the rent, rates, electricity, insurance etc. the setup has an overhead. As a photographer I don't think it is logical to design a system where even my theoretical earnings are less than a technician at a lab. As a photographer I have the added disadvantage that I would not use the scanning setup everyday. Therefore the investment would be much less efficient than a bureau charging $75 - $125 using their Macs and stuff all the time. Whenever I've mentioned 50Mb drum scans at $10 on the Stockphoto list I've had lots of people ask where?. If you know cheaper please tell. I did mention that they are done on a CGI scanner which is considerably more than $2,500. More like a $150,000 investment by the bureau. (For those who don't know the CGI has a unique evaporating oil and the film goes on the inside of the drum. Throughput is much faster than conventional drum scanners because there is no taping or oil cleaning.) What seems to be the killer is the dust problem. The bureaux scans are clean which is wonderful. Looking at a full screen image on a monitor is like looking out of an open window at the scene. Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk In a message dated 24/5/01 6:34:34 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Ten perfect pictures per hour seems an unreasonably high expactation to me, too--that's as many as I've *ever* done, without correcting for dust or much of anything else--i.e. not perfect! If I could do that consistently with any kind of quality, I'd either have an imaging system for sale (having completed everything I set out to do), or go into the business of scanning other people's slides negs for profit. :-) OTOH, 7.50 per drum-scan is a bit pricey, too. With a somewhat arbitrary cost of $2500 (US) for a filmscanner, you'd have to do 334 at that price to win back your money, providing you didn't do it On The Clock. If your time is worth anything, you'd have to factor that in, as well. :-| The math is *interesting*. If you can consistently make $75-100 per hour (whatever dollar conversion you'd like) in your working hours, the drum scans are your friend! Anything more or less would impact on the value of doing your own scans, cost/profit-wise. Figuring a maximum amorization of 4 years for the cost of the scanner (with 2 being more realistic, IMO), that's $625-1025 per year. Even if you can only make a $50-per-hour average for a 40/60-hour week without making scans yourself (discounting the cost of perfect drum scans), it's probably to your advantage to do the drums.
Re: filmscanners: OT: photographing on the street
In a message dated 21/5/01 5:05:05 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This area of law is not my area of expertise - I am a corporate lawyer. I know enough to be wary. I do some street photography and do not get model releases. I have always wondered what a model release is anyway. If I were to draft one that truly covered my risks, the release would probably be several pages long. Actually model releases cover two different things. The right to expose the persons privacy and the right to exploit the image. If you are dealing with a professional model you are asking for use related to commercial exploitation. You probably will have to pay more for a poster than a small trade ad. There is a general theory which holds that the more work a model gets the less future work they will get. They can often only work for one perfume company for instance. This argument cannot be used by a non-professional model or a child who is deemed to not suffer financial loss of earnings with the publication of their image. This is where invasion of privacy seems a bit of a minefield. A few years ago the context had to be defamatory or cause actual emotional pain. Now it seems that lawyers get called because someone wants to get rich quick. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: drum scanning services
In a message dated 23/5/01 1:37:56 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I think you are right, and they are saying some very strange things. Whenever I come across drum operators (in the context of magazine repro), they go to great lengths (4 or 5 words) to explain that my puny 4,000ppi scans are no good even for a postage stamp headshot, and that they scan *everything* at 12,000ppi. Where have you tried? Metro should know what they are talking about. Dear Tony What they might mean is that the sharpness of a $100,000 scanner capable of doing 12,000 ppi will give a better result than a 4000 ppi desktop scanner even when only 4000lines are needed. A scan at 12,000 would only be employed by a repro house for a 40 x 60 inch high quality repro from a 35mm trannie but only in the most extreme quality circumstances. For magazine repro they'll use much less. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: which space?
In a message dated 22/5/01 3:05:24 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: We don't disagree - I work primarily in LAB and CMYK myself, for both web and print, but then convert to RGB for final contrast adjustments and to send to the printer. Dear Maris To the best of my knowledge RGB to CMYK is a one way conversion. CMYK to RGB although possible will cause problems. Although its OK for web use and ink jet printers have you tried litho print when it needs converting back again? Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: drum scanning services
In a message dated 22/5/01 8:01:41 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Every drum scanning bureaux here (central London) seems to think asking for a file this big is ridiculous. One suggests 80Mb as a maximum another 120Mb. Why? Nobody can explain to me why I would want a small file and have the Lambda RIP invent pixels (sorry, interpolate) to make up the 400 dpi output needed, when I have real pixels readily available on my large format negative. I went to the bother of shooting 5x7 precisely because I wanted the sharpest and purest tones possible to record. Now I'm being shunted downstream by drum operators.. Dear Laurie This is a bit like asking advice in a hi fi showroom. How good are your ears or in this case eyes? Have you really compared the output from a 480Mb and a 120Mb file? Could you really see the difference? I have seen scan tests done from 6 x 7 inch transparencies which were if anything better than the original ektachromes at only 40Mb. USM was applied. Gene Fisher did an exhibition in Canada with very good (expensive) sponsorship and worked with the highest quality output in California. His files were 120Mb if I remember and the prints were big from linhof panoramic trannies. The important thing is to match the pixel lines exactly with the output with led printers. I have gone just under your print size and the file size was only 56Mb so I have a hunch your calculation is out somewhere. Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
Re: filmscanners: repro wars (was drum scanning services)
In a message dated 23/5/01 2:24:45 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Bob, I know what you say makes perfect sense - the 150-180LPI screen needs no more than ~300dpi at repro size. But the run-ins I have had with these guys suggest that they regard 12,000ppi as necessary, because that's what they get out of their drums and send to the imagesetter. They frighten production eds silly with this sort of nonsense, and I have come across it enough to think it isn't just lack of communication or different conceptual frameworks of different industries. They just want to hang on to magazine scanning as it's their bread and butter. Dear Tony 12,000 ppi is definately not what they send to the image setter. Image setters are quite slow beasts and many repro houses run them through the night to get enough use out of them. To get the RIP and Setter to run at its fastest the scan will most likely be automatically cut to the minimum required. 12,000 lpi is the resolution of some film setters but that is s omething else altogether. I have now done some self publishing via CTP (computer to plate printing) The Scitex platemaker changes the entire Quark document and associated TIFFs to a special Scitex file which is a bit like a PDF because it includes the text instructions too. 115mm x 165mm high quality postcards require and use an 11Mb Scitex file. An A4 on the same system would be about 30Mb. I agree that some repro houses are desperate to hang onto what work they can. They lost film makeup with DTP and imposed film output. They are losing proofing and film output with CTP. They are also losing scanning work to other repro houses who have invested in modern scanners which have much greater throughput and can afford lower prices. Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
filmscanners: What is 4,000 scanner quality like in practice.
In a message dated 23/5/01 9:28:55 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: If you ever want to use your scanner for other purposes (full res scanning etc., full quality), then you are better off with another more expensive scanner with ICE or FARE (dust removal algorithms), Apparently some photographers are using 4000 ppi scanners for digital stock picture submissions. The new 4000 scanners from Polaroid and Nikon which take 120 film make this an interesting proposition for me. However, I am concerned on several points and Cornwall is not the place to find these scanners in action. Dust seems to be a big concern. Just how much time is spent dust busting a scan? A test I did on PCD was giving me about 15 minutes work on dust alone which is far too long. Does ICE lose scan quality? Is a cheap, if you call £3,000 cheap, scanner a workable substitute for a drum scan? I can currently get 50Mb CGI drum scans at £7.50 each which are absolutely spotless. If I got a 4000 desktop scanner of my own it would need to produce about ten fully finished scans per hour to be worth considering. Is this possible considering the amount of time that dust busting might take? Yours Bob Croxford Cornwall England www.atmosphere.co.uk
