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.

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 »

Burned four more CDs of photos. I’m using Mitsui Gold 650MB CD-Rs, which I ordered specially. Stores don’t seem to stock standards-compliant high-quality CD-Rs any more; everyone wants non-standard 700MB CD-Rs that are as cheap as possible. So anyway, I’ve finished with the major travel pictures—East Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and a few last shots of St Petersburg. Now to switch back to video for a while…

But first, I finally played Diablo II. I started at around 16:30, and finished just a few minutes ago because I really need to sleep, so I think it’s safe to say I’m going to get my $20 worth.

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.

People and software conspired to treat me to a crappy day today. I’ve spent the evening on photography; I’ve finally finished restoring a batch of 50 slides from 1969, and added another image to the photos page…

32 CDs burnt. No coasters.

The old slides take a hellishly long time to fix up. Some of them have aged in inexplicable ways, like the one I scanned yesterday where the sky has turned purple but everything else is fine. There didn’t seem to be any obvious PhotoShop adjustment to make to the whole image to fix it, so I had to resort to airbrushing out the purple. Not much fun, given that there were trees on the horizon.