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.<p>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.<p>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.
Hey! I took a dive into the FlexTight scanners late last year and actually got my FlexTight Precision II to work on 64-bit Windows 11:
<a href="https://pathar.tl/resources/flextight" rel="nofollow">https://pathar.tl/resources/flextight</a>
<a href="https://pathar.tl/resources/flexcolor" rel="nofollow">https://pathar.tl/resources/flexcolor</a><p>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).<p>Let me know if you have any questions!
> That’s 2500 to 7500.- CHF worth of scans if I get a third party to do it.<p>This is how I ended up with my first laser printer.<p>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.<p>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 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.
> The software that drives these scanners is compiled for 32bit architecture and hasn’t been updated in well over 10 years<p>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.<p>> 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<p>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.
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.<p>Seems a pity.
> 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.<p>...<p>> 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.<p>...<p>> 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.<p>This is the dark side of patents.<p>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.<p>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.
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
<a href="https://cancer.digitalslidearchive.org/#!/CDSA/acc/TCGA-OR-A5J1" rel="nofollow">https://cancer.digitalslidearchive.org/#!/CDSA/acc/TCGA-OR-A...</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.<p>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.<p>While it's no FlexTight, I am happy with the results, especially because I had no plans to crop.<p>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.<p>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.
+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.<p>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...<p>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).
Sounds like maintaining these high end medium format cameras and scanners can be a real hassel.<p>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.
Also see a hacker with an excellent write-up about getting a commercial Kodak (OEM Pakon) 35mm scanner from the 2000’s working on Windows 11: <a href="https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2022/09/04/pakon-reverse-engineering/" rel="nofollow">https://ktkaufman03.github.io/blog/2022/09/04/pakon-reverse-...</a> discussion <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714806" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32714806</a>
Nikon made a massive medium-format scanner, too: The Super Coolscan 9000[0].<p>That's supported by VueScan[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.filmscanner.info/en/NikonSuperCoolscan9000ED.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.filmscanner.info/en/NikonSuperCoolscan9000ED.htm...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#technical-information" rel="nofollow">https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/nikon_coolscan_9000_ed.html#...</a>
I got an old Heidelberg Tango drum scanner [0] just for my dad's old full format images... If you set an ebay alarm, you can get them really cheap.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.michaelstricklandimages.com/blog/2018/4/4/drum-scanning" rel="nofollow">https://www.michaelstricklandimages.com/blog/2018/4/4/drum-s...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I <i>had</i> 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.
Thank you for this post.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Doesn’t solve the mainboard problem on the Hasselblad side of course. And doesn’t <i>completely</i> 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.<p>Have you had the chance to look into this side of it enough to give any hints about it?<p>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 :)<p>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!
> Hasselblad refuse to update it to modern architectures, and refuse to open source it to allow others to do that.<p>Hasselblad are idiots then.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/supported-scanners.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai" rel="nofollow">https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-photo-ai</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Around the turn of the century I used it thousands of 120 film (6x6cm) negatives shot from my beautiful 1980s Plaubel Makina 67.<p>I’ve often thought of resuscitating the camera from its pelican box sarcophagus but the idea of scanning the negatives gives me chills.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.photographyreview.com/product/digital-gear/scanners/film-scanners/polaroid/sprintscan-120-film-scanner.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.photographyreview.com/product/digital-gear/scanne...</a>
I would love for the hacker crowd to start looking into repurposing old scanner technology.<p>I am waiting EAGERLY for the first open source scanner made for negatives. It's so sorely missed, and so far i'm on my third flatbed and not happy at all. It's silly when the line-scanner is the same for all of them more or less.<p>Someone should really do a reverse engineering on some of it.
One way to avoid the problems of devices no longer supported by drivers is to use open source software <i>and put pressure on vendors</i>.<p>Linux was gaining ground on open source drivers this for a while, but then it seemed like we started to backslide.<p>Open source works best if more people treat it like a marriage commitment, not the occasional random holiday fling.
I worked for years for a professional photographer with a vast commercial archive.<p>After every finished project we would copy the files to a thumb drive and <i>print</i> the top 10-20 images at around 14" long edge >300dpi and place everything in a simple archival box.<p>The logic being that even if the digital copy becomes unsustainable because of interface change or degrading, you could still scan or photograph the prints.<p>Most analog prints you see 'digitized' on Instagram are iPhone photographs of prints laid flat. It's all a bit ridiculous.
Ok, so the old Hasselblad scanners are breaking down and his big box store scanner isn't good enough. The unanswered question I have is why he doesn't buy a modern professional scanner. Modern pro scanners blow past his 8000 dpi benchmark at less than a quarter the cost of the old Hasselblad.
YAGNI.<p><i>probably in the region of 75 to 200 frames.</i><p>That’s a lot of images for a fine art photography book. Particularly if the images are 60cm on the short side…and at full bleed and through the gutter a book would be about 80cm wide.<p>It is also a lot for a gallery show at that size — at about 1600mm x 600mm, 75 images would cover the floor of a one bedroom apartment…two hundred would cover a the floor of a spacious three bedroom house.<p>An editor might be a good way to reduce cost of the goal is a book. And no agent would want an artist to release dozens of images at once.
I wonder if there is an alternate optical solution using a macro lens. Use an even backlight and a dedicated macro lens to take a digital picture of the negative and postprocess. This is essentially what the Hasselblad scanner seems to be doing.
Ugh I'm doing this at the moment. I do not want ANYTHING to do with scanners. They are worse than printers for being complete ball aches.<p>Using a light box and a Nikon Z50 and 50-250 lens arranged roughly like this: <a href="https://www.scantips.com/g4/p1230510.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.scantips.com/g4/p1230510.jpg</a>
He also wrote an article about his first scan on PetaPixel from 2017:
<a href="https://petapixel.com/2017/05/01/16000-photo-scanner-vs-500-scanner/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2017/05/01/16000-photo-scanner-vs-500-...</a>
Kinda wish there were more details on this page to understand or interpret what the author is talking about or compared it to.<p>I have a Canon 9000F (consumer grade) that is getting very old now and often difficult to get running when I pull it out, but it scans film at 2400dpi which has been adequate for my home archival purposes. I don't know if this is in the ballpark of what the author used as the comparison for the consumer scanner (nor is the DPI cited). About 8 years ago I was going to start a new film scanning project and thought "Hey, maybe now's the time to buy an updated film scanner" but I learned there is very little on the consumer market and it's gotten very expensive.<p>I think the 9000f hasn't been made in a while but I still find it to be a great scanner when I need this.
I just bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 off of eBay recently, and upgrading to macOS Monterey has made it unreadable. Time to downgrade back to Mojave by way of Time Machine, because Apple hates legacy hardware of third party OEMs, never mind its own.
> A Hasselblad Flextight X1. Google the thing for the price if you’re curious, and no I wasn’t going to pay that much, I was going to pay less than half of that (a bargain to be fair).<p>I hate the author.<p>EDIT: I found a price, it's $10k.
I'm surprised FireWire port repair is that difficult/expensive. Can't be that much to it, you just need to source the same/similar controller from another (much cheaper!) device, no?
I made the big mistake of purchasing a "CZUR Book Scanning solution" the year before last. The camera on it is sooo shit that I ended up just resting my phone on top of the thing and getting better results just using it as a lamp.. Sure there is some laser contour detection of pages and then flattening, if you use their windows only software to with it, but the resolution is so low its only good for black and white text only books.
I thought it was interesting how in the crop comparison, the effective low pass filtering on the worse scan makes it look better to my eyes.<p>Don't get me wrong, the better scan is still much better. The correct way if you want to go for that effect is to get the better scan and then explicitly apply whatever low pass filtering you want, not to low pass filter with a less detailed scan. But I thought it was a neat demonstration. Like squinting your eyes.
I don't have to create 160cm wide prints but I have scanned medium format frames on an Epson v600 flatbed and the results with the right software is more than serviceable. In fact, Nick Carver uses a v800 to scan fairly high quality images he creates big prints from. Although he does go to a drum scanner shop for the mammoth 6x17 prints but it simply goes to show that the return on value is very high on the right consumer grade scanner.
You can easily run most Flextight scanners on windows 10. I think you just need to install two version of Flexcolor. I have extensive experience in dealing with old scanners as this is actually my line of work. In our company we have almost over 20 scanners of certain types from various brands: Flextight, Noritsu, and primarily Fuji. We use a lot of KVM virtualisation using linux to passthrough PCI cards to VMs.
I wonder whether making multiple scans on a decent and more accessible scanner with a small physical shake after each one and stacking the images can get you acceptable higher resolution results. After all, all smartphones do it today for each photo, and the astronomers have been doing it for decades.
> 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. .... I went through several weeks of debugging to eventually conclude the port or main board was bad and was this not prepared to drop 5,000 Euros on it<p>So I don't know the author's own personal financial situation, but for me given the options 'E5000 plus weeks of effort and uncertain results' or 'E8000 and some legwork to find someone to do the work' or 'E11000 and some annoyances to have the manufacturer do it' I don't think I would have made the same choice.
Do modern equivalents of these scanners exist, but they're too expensive for the author? Or has the market for such things declined to the point where you just can't buy them anymore? (If so, why? Everything's just end to end digital now, so nothing to scan, I guess?)
Ten years ago I paid for some proprietary software to help me collate my photographic archive. The project was very successful but the software is also 32bit Intel only. Since Catalina onwards I have not been able to access the archive at all. It causes me a lot of anxiety.<p>Thanks Adobe / Apple! Hopefully Lightroom 6 runs on Windows, but I just never seem to have gotten around to trying. I think it’s mostly out of fear that it won’t work and I will realize I am shut out of my collection metadata forever.
"Absolutely no contest, and there’s no way I can interpolate the consumer scan up to achieve files good enough to print 160x60cm. I need high quality scans of these negatives."<p>I have a strong sense that the original author has not tried any of these upscaling techniques:<p><a href="https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-super-resolution-on-set5-4x-upscaling" rel="nofollow">https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-super-resolution-on-se...</a>
Even for consumer scanners, it seems I’m helping my parents fight unmaintained proprietary firmware on Windows every few years. Eventually I just set them up with SANE.
I recently got a (35mm/APS) Canon scanner working really well with <a href="http://www.sane-project.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sane-project.org/</a> - not the same as the one mentioned in the article, but a really good collection of open source backends for old film scanners.
Licenses and driver source codes are assets that costed them money and are still valuable, that's their reasoning, I guess.<p>We (society) could ask them nicely to sell this stuff, and then raise money and buy them.<p>Nobody demands you to give out the stuff that you don't use for free, why should we demand it from a company?
I don't know but I suspect the consumer grade scanner can actually be useful. Scan several times, stack the images, and then deconvolute them. I think you could probably get great quality. Now how long it would take I don't know, probably way too much time though.
Can DRIZZLE help to achieve higher resolution? Though with hundreds of photos this will imply a lot of work:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(image_processing)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_(image_processing)</a>
What’s the best option for standard 35mm film? I have a bunch of negatives sat in a box that I’d love to get digital copies of before they end up getting damaged. Should I buy a scanner? Or am I best off using a a scanning service?
I have a Nikon Coolscan that I keep running. On Windows there's a "compatibility mode" that I think means "pretend you have a 32-bit address space" that I need to use to run the drivers.
Could you use a 35mm condenser enlarger to project the image directly onto a scanner bed? You would probably need to disable the light in the scanner, remove the glass, and upgrade the light in the enlarger.
I still don't understand why 32bit can't be executed in a special process mode or in Rosetta. Just seems like a ridiculous hill to die on. Few apps use more than 4gb of memory.
this is one of the reasons I would highly recommend digitizing any analog film media you might have lying around that has any value whatsoever. Technology like this, that greatly assists in “crossing over“ the old media to the forever-digital media, is disappearing in accessibility due to lack of utility – once everyone goes digital-native (which has already occurred), there is less and less of a reason to have high quality analog to digital converters.
Again, I will write. The job of an OS is to provide an abstracted shim between HW customers have, and the software they have. When this doesn't happen it is a giant fail. There are untold thousands of devices just like this scanner for which the choices to drop support (or change) the OS driver ABI puts people in a bad position because frequently this low volume specialty hardware costs more than the OS vendors product and a new PC/etc to run it because the HW vendor uses MS/Apple/etc's decisions as a chance to force their customers to upgrade to the latest HW. Frequently when the old stuff continues to work just fine.<p>So IMHO this is a giant middle finger from the OS vendors to their customers, because (as an OS developer myself) dropping support for these kinds of things are rarely done because its costing developer time to have modules that are mostly untouched for years in the tree, or infrequently provide a small shim from the new driver model to the old one. And even when it turns out to be real effort, the OS vendors show us they can provide very transparent shims as long as it benefits them and not a second longer (ex most recently doing transparent x86 emulation on arm based machines).
I'm a very happy user of Epson V850 Pro.
It does scan negatives at 6400dpi.
Costs fraction of X1 price and works with the latest MacOS on M1 device.<p>PS: It helps when you use it with 3rd party drivers - VueScan.