116 Equipment
stock. Or you might just prefer the look and feel of fi lm images. Either
way, you have to convert analogue fi lm images into bits of data, and
that means scanning them.
My advice is don’t waste old images—making dollars from
cents means maximizing returns from each suitable image in your
collection! If you are a complete fanatic about quality, the best
scans come from drum scanners. Drum scanners are the 500-lb.
gorillas of the scanning world, and once you would have had to
spend $40,000 or more to buy one. They capture image information
with photomultiplier tubes (PMT) rather than with the CCD arrays
found in fl atbed scanners. They require a little practice to use.
Negatives or transparencies have to be stuck to the outer surface
of a transparent drum, which is rotated at high speed so the
image can be “read” in strips as the drum moves along its carriage.
Transparent overlays are used to sandwich the image between
the drum and overlay, and liquids can be used in the sandwich to
improve scan quality.
You can now fi nd decent used drum scanners on eBay for
around a few hundred dollars; the demand from repro houses
and graphic design agencies is just not there anymore as digital
capture replaces fi lm and the quality of desktop CCD scanners improves.
With a bit of effort and help from support groups like the Scan-Hi
End group on Yahoo! (set up by your author), a used drum scanner
can be great high-quality alternative to their more ubiquitous CCD-
based cousins. I use one myself, an old Howtek Scanmaster 4500,
a popular “desktop” drum scanner. Many drum scanners you see
for sale use outdated and unsupported software that may require
older Macintosh computers to run on, but there are software
packages from Lasersoft that will drive some of these old beasts
on more modern computers.
Perhaps a less exotic alternative is a dedicated fi lm scanner, such
as the Nikon Coolscan range, that takes strips of 35-mm fi lm or indi-
vidual mounted transparencies. Microtek and Canon, among others,
also make dedicated fi lm scanners. There are medium-format options
too from Nikon and Microtek, and at the top of the CCD pile, Hassel-
blad sells some very pricey virtual drum scanners under the Flextight
brand name that are almost as expensive as true drum scanners. The
CCD desktop scanners are not cheap, but they arguably offer the best
quality–cost compromise.
A further alternative that makes particular sense for anyone with
medium- or large-format fi lm to scan is the affordable range of fl atbed
scanners (Figure 6.9) with fi lm scanning kits available from Epson and
Canon. Results from these scanners are not quite as good as from
dedicated fi lm scanners, but they come close based on tests I have
conducted.