Live from Austin!

As you may have gathered if you subscribe to my Flickr stream, the infamous Nikon scanner decided it didn’t want to scan any more. Or rather, it would scan, but the scan head wouldn’t move, resulting in some interesting modern art.

I took the case off and looked for any obviously fixable mechanical problems, but couldn’t see any. It would probably be possible to get it working by disassembling the mechanism, but I’m not that mechanically oriented.

It’s not like I’ve abused the scanner, and it has only had light residential use. So that’s definitely the last Nikon product I will ever buy.

I zipped off to the web and did a quick search for reviews of film scanners. Turns out that technology has advanced (as usual). Canon now have dual-mode flatbed/film scanners that are so good that they have stopped making old-style dedicated film scanners. Their finest model is also less than half the price the Nikon was back when it was new.

So, I bought a Canon CanoScan 9950F from Newegg. It arrived yesterday. It’s clearly a pro grade scanner; it feels far more hefty and resilient than any other flatbed I’ve used. It also has two killer features.

The first is that you can load it with up to 30 images (5 strips of negatives) in one go, and it’ll churn away for an hour or so and scan them all automatically. Major time saver.

The second is that it has an adaptor for larger film sizes, including 120 and 645. So I’ll be able to scan my dad’s prize winning 645 photos. It’s also higher resolution than the Nikon, with better bit depth.

It also does all the usual flatbed stuff, including turning documents into PDF with OCR. I use this to turn interesting magazine articles into PDFs for reference.

So, how do the results look? At least as good as the Nikon, and the software is miles better. The FARE auto-fix stuff even seems to do a better job than VueScan, though the sharpening is a bit over-zealous (but can be turned off).

Since I know people find my web pages while searching for information about Nikon scanners and Mac OS X, I’d like to offer the following endorsement:

The Ratoc FR1SX Ultra-SCSI to Firewire adaptor works perfectly with Mac OS X 10.3, and doesn’t need any drivers.

Plug the unit in to the back of your SCSI-based Nikon film scanner, and you suddenly have a Firewire-based Nikon film scanner. This can then be used with Ed Hamrick’s excellent VueScan software to fulfil all your scanning needs.

No adaptor drivers, no Nikon drivers, no Nikon software of any kind—so this solution should work fine with 10.4 / Tiger and other forthcoming OS X versions too.

Unlike USB options, the Firewire interface seems to result in scanning being just as fast and reliable as it was with SCSI.

Someone with a new Nikon digital SLR took a bunch of photos of the Space Shuttle as it rolled out to the launch pad from the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Sheesh, that thing looks skanky, the right side looks like a model that someone’s spilt coffee on. Now I understand what they mean by “ageing shuttle fleet”. I’m not sure I’d want to fly in it.

There are more photos posted at keyhole.com, but what really jolted me awake there was the photo showing the Shuttle from space (third on that page). If that’s what civilian satellites can do, the NSA can probably spot whether your shoelaces are untied.

In 2001–2003, I had a rather bad experience with Nikon Digital’s repair service. The product I had problems with was an APS adaptor for a high end film scanner, but other people have written to me with similar tales of woe regarding digital cameras and digital SLRs.

Briefly:

1. I discovered that while Nikon are reknowned for the quality of their lenses, they also make some really shoddy products. High price and the Nikon name is no guarantee of quality.

2. I found out that if you buy a faulty Nikon digital imaging product, such as a scanner or a digital camera, your chances of getting it repaired or replaced with a working product seem to be pretty slim.

3. When Nikon were unable to get the product to work after four attempts, I couldn’t get a refund for the non-working product without a year of ignored letters, phone calls and faxes.

4. The Nikon product jammed with some of my irreplacable negatives inside. I couldn’t open up the unit to get the film out without voiding the warranty, and Nikon failed to extricate and return the film.

I did finish scanning the rest of my APS film cassettes, no thanks to Nikon. I had to break open each cassette, pull out the film, and chop it up into individual frames. I then mounted each frame in a 35mm glass slide, adjusting for the size difference by using plastic spacers cut by hand from old subway passes using a sharp knife and a metal ruler. As you can imagine, the process was very fiddly and laborious and no fun at all.

Anyway, here’s the whole sorry tale…

Continue reading »

According to someone who’s compared, the new Canon EOS 1Ds blows away 35mm film, and is good enough that he’s abandoning medium format.

I’m particularly impressed that it can take a picture of the milky way through an f/3.5 lens!

I spent most of the day scanning. I have finally finished digitizing the last of the APS cassettes. It was the same painful process of mounting each one in a slide mount with a makeshift plastic spacer cut from a T pass, scanning, removing the spacer, and storing the slide away just in case. Now all I need to do is get Nikon to give me the refund they promised me back in July for the non-working APS adaptor, and I can put the whole sorry episode behind me.

Then I watched Final Destination. What can I say? I just can’t resist a good film about death. Or even a somewhat cheesy film about death. It’s a shame, the concept is fine, the execution is at times surreal and humorous, there’s an adequate amount of tension… yet they couldn’t help putting in clichés so old that you could fill in the basic plot structure within the first fifteen minutes.

The most interesting part of the DVD was the bonus material. Along with the deleted scenes was a short documentary detailing how test screenings were used to tailor the movie to an audience. The film makers are quite blunt in admitting that their single goal was to entertain as many people as possible in their target demographic—teenage and early-20s horror movie fans. The ending was changed utterly, the original message of the movie was deleted. They describe the process as dumbing down the movie, albeit not with that precise phrase… still, that’s bravery.

More interesting still, though, is that this is a rare example of a film I feel was improved by being hacked about to please test screenings. No spoilers for the new ending, but the old one was a ghastly piece of sentimental preaching that said that we could all cheat death by having babies and bringing new life into the world. What a load of crap. And it said it with the subtlety of a brick to the forehead. The filmmakers thought the audience didn’t like it because it was too downbeat and cerebral; it seems it didn’t occur to them, or didn’t appear on the feedback cards, that maybe nobody liked it because it was bullshit wrapped in saccharine, a combination that can make even a teen audience gag.

Still, in the end they got their audience-pleaser, and I think it was better for the edits artistically speaking, so everyone should be happy, yes?

After the movie, the evening was still young. I decided that since sara was away doing things unspecified with persons unknown, it was an appropriate time to watch Eyes Wide Shut. Finally.

I realize that as a Kubrick fan, it’s pretty shocking that it’s taken me so long. My excuse is that I refused to watch the censored version, and it took me a while to track down an uncensored DVD at a reasonable price. (For the record, the best option for US viewers is to get the region 3 DVD from Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore or China. It’s NTSC, with all the features of the US release, soundtrack in English with optional subtitles.)

I don’t think I’m prepared to say too much about it after only one viewing. It wasn’t as strange and disturbing as I was expecting, but I think that’s because my weirdness meter is calibrated for David Lynch. My initial reading of the movie is that the whole thing is a lengthy metaphorical statement on the value of love and trust and the dangers (physical and also spiritual) of empty, meaningless sex.

Not that that makes sleeping alone tonight any more enjoyable.

Turn your Nikon digital camera into a surrealist art machine—just add water.

Spent an intellectually stimulating but ultimately fruitless few hours trying to port a piece of badly-written Amiga software to Mac OS X.

Copied a bunch of TV shows to tape for Laura.

The APS adaptor for my film scanner broke. Luckily it’s still under warranty. I could do without the hassle, though. I’ve decided to ship it back to Nikon, and have them repair it—then I’ll try and scan every single roll of APS in as little time as possible. If it breaks again during that time, I’ll demand a refund. If the worst comes to the worst, I can extract the APS film from the cassettes by brute force, scan the negatives using the film strip holder, and pretend they’re 35mm. It’s not like I’ll ever get any more optical prints, after all.

How did Polaroid end up bankrupt? They’re looking at either selling the company, or filing Chapter 11. They expect to default on over $30m of loan payments in the next few months.

It’s easy to say that they were caught out by digital cameras, but it’s not that simple. I remember the early days of digital photography, around 1996-97. For a while, Polaroid were leaders in the field—the PDC-2000 was well-reviewed, and praised for its outstanding image quality. Later on, Polaroid launched digital cameras at consumer prices that were competitive with those from Nikon, Canon, Kodak, and so on.

They also knew their patents on instant photography were going to expire. So what happened? Why did they throw all their energies at cheap plastic instant cameras with pictures of The Spice Girls and Hello Kitty on them, and ignore digital? Maybe someone will write a book about it, like the various books about how Apple and Xerox made incredibly boneheaded decisions. For now, my guess is that someone high up wasn’t able to demonstrate flexibility.

I miss the Polaroid head office that used to be in Tech Square. And I was sorry when the other Polaroid building on the riverfront had its classic 30s design ruined.

Some people may wonder why my web site was left unchanged for over a year. Well, I’m engaged in a lengthy project to digitize my entire photo collection, using a Nikon film scanner to produce 3000×2000 scans direct from the negatives.

Some of the images are decades old, and often the film has deteriorated and needs careful restoration. Color film in the 70s really wasn’t very stable, and these negatives haven’t been particularly well cared for either. My plan is to scan them, fix them, and archive them onto digital media.

Of course, this requires some care—five years ago, it might have seemed like a sensible idea to archive onto Syquest cartridges, after all. Who’s to say what will be around in another decade? Will we even be able to read most of today’s file formats? (How many art programs read NeoPaint files?)

A lot of people use TIFF. Few of them realize it, but TIFF is a really ugly file format originated by Microsoft. I say it’s ugly because I’ve read the specification. It has a zillion variations, including different byte ordering on different platforms. I’ve seen graphics packages which both claim to read and write TIFF, but won’t read each other’s files. So for archiving, TIFF is a definite no-no.

PNG is an open standard, it’s lossless, and it gets better compression than practically every comparable format, including TIFF. Because it uses no patented algorithms, it’s likely that every graphics program will at least have code to read it. Because Open Source implementations of the algorithm are available, I know that if the worst comes to the worst I can always write my own program to read PNG and write it into whatever’s the appropriate format in ten years’ time. So it’s PNG for me.

Anyway, after months of work my hard drive was getting dangerously full, so this weekend I bought a CD burner. Of all the data storage media out there, I think CD is the one most likely to still be readable in a couple of decades. I’m planning on using the Kodak pro-grade gold CD-Rs, which have a rated life of 100 years.

CD is a bit of a bitch to use, however. You have to burn the discs, verify them afterwards, and so on. On PCs, this generally involves a lot of dicking around with flaky driver software; the ThinkPad at work refuses to boot if the CD burner is plugged in, so you have to boot first, then plug and pray, and about half the time it’ll then recognize the drive. Assuming that worked, you can then try and burn a disc, which works about 80% of the time. The rest of the time the CD burning software hangs while updating the catalog at the end of the burn, and you have another coaster.

I was determined not to have similar experiences at home. Of course, I have a Mac at home, so that was a good start. Then I picked out a CD burner which was Firewire, so (a) I wouldn’t have any buffer underrun problems, and (b) I wouldn’t have to dick around with SCSI or USB drivers and termination problems.

Next, I narrowed my selection down to CD burners which were approved by Adaptec (who now want to be called Roxio), who make the Toast software used by practically everyone who burns CDs for a living.

Finally, I picked a drive which had the latest BurnProof technology. This is a hardware feature where if the drive stops receiving data fast enough—say, because Internet Explorer chokes while you’re browsing the web—the laser stops in a controlled fashion, marking how far it had got so it can continue when the data flow resumes. Which means fewer coasters, and the option of burning CDs while doing something else.

That’s the theory. Of course, no matter how careful and prepared you are, the universe has a way of screwing you over. In this case, I managed to get a faulty CD burner, and wasted most of yesterday trying to coax it into working properly. It would act just like it was working, but the CD would never verify and would be full of random (but sonically interesting) flipped bits.

Fortunately, I foresaw even this eventuality. Rather than trying to save $50 by buying online, I had decided to slum it and buy from CompUSA. So instead of paying two sets of shipping charges and waiting several days for a replacement, I picked up another burner this morning. The new one works fine. Rips at 40x, burns at 14x. Sweet!

I’ll carry on using DVD-RAM for day-to-day stuff, as it’s just vastly more convenient than CD. But now when everything’s finalized and annotated and cataloged, I can burn it on gold for keeps.

The CDRW drive I picked was a QPS Que! and in spite of the initial problems, I’m happy with it on balance.