I thought some of you might enjoy seeing this. I went down to
Petaluma today and Lenny Eiger introduced me to scanning with a drum
scanner.
I essentially got a crash course in the practicalities of drum scans
from someone with a lot of practical experience in making them. I've
been all ripped-up this week about my cat having liver failure (I
buried her last night) and I'd mis-read Lenny's email about bringing
something *not* too challenging for a first scan. I glanced through
some boxes of 30-year-old Ektachrome quickly last night and brought
along a slide taken inside a van. There's a window on the verge of
being blown out and an interior that was so deeply in shadow that it
was almost black. Something taken in a band vehicle a long time ago
of a drummer napping. Before I left this morning I'd scanned the
slide at the 6400 dpi setting on my V700. Lenny scanned it at 8000
dpi on his Aztek. I've uploaded both a lossless .jpf and a jpeg. The
jpeg actually looks pretty close to the same as the jpf and it's one
meg instead of seventeen, just FYI. You can see them here:
These are 100% crops. The V700 on top, obviously. I scaled the V700
scan up to the 8000 dpi so it would be the same size as the Aztek
scan. It's amazing how much more detail the Aztek pulled out of the
slide. And this was a ratty old Ektachrome 400 slide. I can hardly
imagine what well-exposed 6x7 or 4x5 would yield under the right
circumstances. One of the most telling things to me is the etched
printing on the window. You can almost read it in the Aztek scan. And
see the area on the right side of the window frame? The Epson scan
has some kind of strange artifact going on. The edge of the window
all the way down through the curve at the bottom looks very strange.
On the Aztek crop it looks very natural and smooth. It's amazing,
really. Almost too much detail.
Lenny is a gentleman with a genuine enthusiasm for what he does and a
great wealth of knowledge and experience to guide him. You couldn't
ask for a better demo of the technology. I'm really happy to know
he's just down the road.
-Robert Jackson
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