What film manufacturers can do to bring back film

[wgerrard]

It's worth getting a PC just to use it.

/T

Uh-huh....

 

[dmr]

The time delay with film is not in the scanning, it's in the processing.

Assuming I don't process myself, and many of us do not, it's the schlepping the film to the lab, waiting, then picking it up. That's a few hours, with or without scanning. That's for common C41 film.

Now for slides, it's several hours at best, up to 5 days or so for Kodachrome.

Even if I want a presentation quality scan and spend several minutes futzing with the settings and rescanning and tweaking and such, it's the processing that really takes up the time, not the scanning.

For me, anyway.

 

[Tuolumne]

Getting back on topic (Ahem): Is there any reason such a device could not be made today with current technology and sold at a price of $2000?

/T

 

[stuken]

With sufficient hardware horsepower, it's probably possible to make your dream scanner. I know I'd like one.

Whether or not such a machine would be commercially viable is a different matter. Scanner companies know what kind of profit, if any, they make from scanners. If any of them see that market as expanding, I'd be very surprised.

Personally, I spend a lot longer noodling around in Photoshop than I do waiting for my scanner to do its job. I hate tweaking images. Taking pictures is fun. Photoshop is pain.

I'd love a piece of software that had default settings I liked, and that would process all the image files in a directory in one nice swoop.

You can create actions in photoshop that do just that. They aren't that hard to make, and very easy to use once made. Google something along the lines of how to make an action in photoshop, you'll get tons of stuff.

 

[ClaremontPhoto]

I don't want a scanner, I want a scanning service.

Didn't Ilford do a D&P service with mailers a few years back?

How about D&Scan for the twentyfirst century with scans sent by internet, and negatives following by post?

 

[Tuolumne]

Tuolumne, I don't know if you ever worked in a wet darkroom, but scanning and photoshop is a breeze compared to making a high quality print in the darkroom. I spent hours and hours on a gallery print, burning and dodging, processing, evaluating, making notes and then making another of the same negative. You had to make little dodging and burning tools out of wire and black construction paper to burn in or hold back just the area you wanted. Then you did another test print and repeated the whole thing.

Ansel Adams negatives required extensive, time intensive, burning and dodging. His work prints were covered with burning and dodging times. He spent hours, in fact days, on some prints.

There is no shortcut to good printing. But digital takes far less time, believe me...I printed in a darkroom for 40 years.

SM,
I did print in my own wet dark room many years ago. I don't have as much experience as you, but enough to know that while I enjoyed wet dark room processing when I was younger, I have absolutely no desire to go back to it. While hybrid workflow times are much shorter than all analogue, we (or I) end up comparing them to an all digital workflow, not the old wet dark room workflow. And compared to the all digital workflow, scanning takes an eternity. And it's not a useful eternity. You are just taking a picture of a picture. Not capturing the original image, not enhancing it in some meaningful way to make a print. You are just turing it into bits for more processing.

Yes, I could just be satisfied with things the way they are, but with that way of thinking we wouldn't have been be blessed with the opportunity of throwing away our camera bodies every 18 months and replacing them will all shiny new ones, would we. 🙂

So, again I ask: Is there any reason why someone like Kodak or Epson or Canon couldn't come out with the scanner of my dreams at a $2000 price point?

/T

 

[wgerrard]

Getting back on topic (Ahem): Is there any reason such a device could not be made today with current technology and sold at a price of $2000?

/T

Beats me. But, technological capabilities do not determine what's on the market. Corporate estimates of profitability determine that. Those decisions are not made in a vacuum. Any firm capable of building that $2000 scanner is going to consider if $1 spent on bringing that canner to market will return more profit than $1 spent on any of its other products.

BTW, you can take a film shot in a millisecond because you're exposing a little bit of film to a bazillion photons. Digital images are built of pixels, and a scanner needs to create each pixel. Maybe not one at a time (I dunno how the firmware works) but, still, sequentially. If a film camera had to work in a similar manner with photons, we'd probably wait days to expose an image.

 

[dmr]

IHow about D&Scan for the twentyfirst century with scans sent by internet, and negatives following by post?

Wally World used to do something like that a while back, except you didn't get the URL for your scans until you picked up your photos in person.

I quit using that when they took away the option to download the full resolution images all in one shot as a zip file.

 

[Tuolumne]

I don't want a scanner, I want a scanning service.

Didn't Ilford do a D&P service with mailers a few years back?

How about D&Scan for the twentyfirst century with scans sent by internet, and negatives following by post?

Jon,
You make an excellent point. Another thing I want is a film processing service that produces high res, high quality scans at the same price point as prints. Why is that so hard/impossible to find. It seems the film processors are trying to soak us film guys to make up for their falling film print business. But that will just drive the market into the ground faster. I found a photo store near my home that offers really high quality film processing and scanning. Very fast, very high quality, but expensive: $22 for a 36 exposure roll of film, or 220 or 120 film. That's a great start, but still why so high? It can't really be that much more expensive to scan the negs than print them. It seems that there is alot that film manufacturerrs/photo processors could do to keep film atttractive if they were only slightly creative in their thinking.

/T

 

[Tuolumne]

Wally World used to do something like that a while back, except you didn't get the URL for your scans until you picked up your photos in person.

I quit using that when they took away the option to download the full resolution images all in one shot as a zip file.

DMR,
I didn't know about that service. Sounds great. But there you see, as soon as the film processing guys hit on a good idea they abandon it rather than enhance it. I just don't get it.

/T

 

[wgerrard]

A local shop will drum scan images and put them on their server for to customers to retrieve. As you note, it ain't cheap.

On the other end of the spectrum, I can pay my drug store $10 and get back negatives, prints, and scanned images on a CD. Scratches and dust are free.

I'd pay another $10 for someone to make the scans and to do minimal, standardized tweaking in Photoshop, but no more.

 

[Tuolumne]

Jon, it could be like the services that will take all your music cd's and rip them to your Ipod. Send them several thousand negative strips or slides and get back DVD's loaded with scans. That would work for me. Might be cost prohibitive, though. A digital music file is an exact copy. A negative or slide scan requires some user intervention. Interesting idea, though.

These services exist but are increadibly expensive: usually around 25 cents per negative/chrome. Ridiculous, but what you'd expect with the glacial scanning speeds that exist today.

/T

 

[wgerrard]

Jon, it could be like the services that will take all your music cd's and rip them to your Ipod. Send them several thousand negative strips or slides and get back DVD's loaded with scans. That would work for me. Might be cost prohibitive, though. A digital music file is an exact copy. A negative or slide scan requires some user intervention. Interesting idea, though.

A better analogy is burning LP's and 45's to a digital format. CD's are already digital, so, as you say, it's just a matter of copying the bits. Going from an LP to digital means creating the bits, just like scanning film.

Any analog-to-digital conversion is going to require some human intervention, if nothing more than the assumptions the software developers write into the code.

Like most here, I shoot film. I do that because I like using my film camera more than my digital cameras. But, I've got no romantic attachment to film. I scan everything. No prints for me. Once I find a digital camera with interchangeable lenses that's the size and weight of my film cameras, and costs the same, I'm gone.

 

[MickH]

Um... so the film process, print and produce a CD copy service as per the offerings from various labs isn't up to snuff? I only ask as I have yet to use this facility, only recently having returned to film (like today!).

 

[Tuolumne]

I scan everything. No prints for me. Once I find a digital camera with interchangeable lenses that's the size and weight of my film cameras, and costs the same, I'm gone.

Have you tried an Epson R-D1? Or as a more expensive alternative, just the M8? At a processing+ film price point of $30/roll (avg film cost+avg processing+scanning+cd), that's just 180 rolls. What many serious photographers will shoot in a year or less. Sometimes much less! Hmmm...maybe I do want that new M8. 🙂

/T

 

[cmedin]

BTW, you can take a film shot in a millisecond because you're exposing a little bit of film to a bazillion photons. Digital images are built of pixels, and a scanner needs to create each pixel. Maybe not one at a time (I dunno how the firmware works) but, still, sequentially. If a film camera had to work in a similar manner with photons, we'd probably wait days to expose an image.

And digital cameras take the shots in the same 'milliseconds' film cameras do... 🙂

What he's asking for is most likely something like this: a sensor like in a digicam, a light source, some optics, and a little hardware/software to support it. Stick in a neg/slide, push a button, the sensor 'takes a picture' of the neg/slide and you're done. No reason it couldn't be done at all, but if it was worth pursuing no doubt such a product would already exist.

 

[Tuolumne]

Um... so the film process, print and produce a CD copy service as per the offerings from various labs isn't up to snuff? I only ask as I have yet to use this facility, only recently having returned to film (like today!).

It is highly variable. More so than print quality was previously? Perhaps not, but there are many fewer places to choose from than before, so it can be hard to judge. Plus the quality of many places seems to vary more day-to-day than it used to. I think I finally found a good place that is used by the local camera shop. For all I know, they may send it to Wal-Mart! 🙂 But I was very happy with the resolution and quality of the scans they did for the first time in a long time. (And they specifically offer high res, high quality scans as an option.) Of course, they did scratch a few negatives, something that really good processors rarely did in the past, but there you go.

/T

 

[Tuolumne]

And digital cameras take the shots in the same 'milliseconds' film cameras do... 🙂

What he's asking for is most likely something like this: a sensor like in a digicam, a light source, some optics, and a little hardware/software to support it. Stick in a neg/slide, push a button, the sensor 'takes a picture' of the neg/slide and you're done. No reason it couldn't be done at all, but if it was worth pursuing no doubt such a product would already exist.

That's exactly what I want. I'm not sure about your conclusion, though. Companies and engineers can get stuck in a rut. Progress is not inevitable in all areas.

/T

 

[40oz]

I think the reason we can have a digital camera that snaps pictures of "reality" almost instantaneously but not a film scanner is because a film scanner is not a digital camera. I don't want digital camera shots of my negatives, because a real film scanner does a better job. Probably because it takes longer to scan the frame.

Obviously we'd all prefer a film scanner to work faster. My current scanner can work faster, I just need to be willing to tolerate lower quaity scans. And after giving it a shot, I'm not willing to tolerate it. "Such is life," I think the saying goes 🙂

 

[Nikon Bob]

SM,
That's the kind of thinking that has given us 30 minute scan times for a negative. What if I told you that your everyday camera's shutter speed depended on what kind of computer it was tehthred to? You'd laugh in my face. All scanning and image creation has to be done onboard the scanner in hardware/firmware. Just like a camera! Every market goes through vissicitudes until the killer product comes along to ignite it. If my future were in film, and for some companies it just is (Illford, for example) I'd be working with some camera/scanner manufacturer to bring out this ultimate "film" product. Else my future is going to be pretty bleak. What we need is the film world equivalent of Steve Jobs. Of course, there is one, but he's working on digital cameras, no doubt. 🙂

/T

I don't know where you are getting 30 minute scan times if you are talking about 35mm negs. My PC is several years old and when first using my Minolta 5400 at top rez with ICE on it took nearly that long. A substantial cure was adding much more RAM than the initial 512 installed. The times dropped to about 10 minutes for the same high rez scan and it is under 2 minutes without ICE on. That would suggest to me that the Minolta scanning program supplied with the scanner is a memory hog and that would also suggest to me that there is a direct connection between the PC and scan times among other things. Could a faster scanner be built at a reasonable retail price? No doubt it could but the market just is not there or the major players would have kept on introducing improved scanners. That market is also continuously shrinking so I doubt the situation is likely to change anytime soon.

Bob