I worked for Corbis back in the days when they were first setting up their
labs, and while I wasn't directly involved with the lab work or the image
taxonomy, a good friend of mine was the guy who designed their initial
scanning labs. The room was a restricted room, ventilated with prefiltered
air and kept at positive pressure (like the silicon fab labs are). They
used drum scanners, and tons of 'air' (compressed helium if I recollect
correctly).
Even so, there was a long arguement as to what resolutions were 'useful',
and they initially chose - primarily for cost/performance reasons, to scan
at 2kx3k for 35mm format, and to scan larger formats at 2kxXk where X was
the appropriate fractional multiplier. Reasoning was that for the majority
of image reuse, 2k would let them be at magazine quality.
They likely are scanning at larger bit depth now that storage costs have
come down, but the goal always was price/performance - with the idea that
for something really critical - say a billboard in Grand Central Sta NY,
they would bill at a rate that covered the rescan.
So while on one hand, the big guys CAN scan better - you can do almost as
good at home. EXCEPT that for important shoots, the final scan IS done at
higher quality.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Yarvin" <brian@brianyarvin.com>
To: <karlsch@earthlink.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:35 PM
Subject: [filmscanners] Re: Digital for magazine publication?
> Very simply, if digital really was the problem these art directors
> claimed, whose buying all those royalty free photo CDs for hundreds of
> dollars each? How is Photodisk and the like remaining in business?
> Some of those disks make for some pretty expensive computer monitor
> wallpaper, and they'd also be pretty boring to look at.
Art and Fellow Listreaders:
The big RF companies use drum scans and offer tech support.
I think the problem is that the mistrust isn't for the concept of
digital, it's for the idea that us little guys can even come remotely
close to the quality the big companies offer.
See if you can beg or borrow a disc or two from PhotoDisc, Corbis,
Brand X or DigitalVision (to name the biggest players) and compare
the scan quality to what our home scanners can offer. Sometimes
we measure up, and sometimes we don't.
Brian Yarvin
Stock Photography from Edison, NJ
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