5 October, 2008 | Filed under “The Archives”
Hooray for an early Christmas this year! I am now the happy owner of a slide scanner. A decade late, you may say with brows lifted, but the old photographer in me is stirring. All because a friend of a friend had an attick with a 20th century museum, in the middle of which RIPed a Nikon LS-2000. With software. Without cables. The latter should prove the only challenge.
My slide projector bit the dust maaaany years ago and positives and negatives were retired to boxes and drawers. At times, when I was in the “don't look back” mood, I even considered scrapping them altogether. That, of course, was prior to the digital era, but the thought of a spring clean for the May queen was never far off even closer to these days with digital cameras in most every home.
When slide scanners hit the market in the 1990s, I could only drool over them. I never justified an investment. The alternative was to hire time with a drum scanner but, again, way too expensive for private use.
The Roman Baths in Bath, England, 1997. Image digitized from “ancient” Agfa RSX 100 positive film – courtesy of the Nikon LS-2000 slide scanner. Photo © Bjørn Sortland.
Earlier this summer my collection of SCSI cables and terminators were actually one step away from the dump, huddled together in a plastic bag out in the shed. Now, SCSI was never just SCSI. It was 25 pin and 50 pin and wide and ultra with Roman numeral I and II and III and who kows what. To connect your peripheral to the computer you needed to wrestle with different cables and connectors. The SCSI “standard” contains various alternatives which may prove mutually exclusive within a system or a bus and I stopped caring about this when USB and FireWire made the scene. Luckily, however, I still had a Macintosh G4 with a SCSI-card in place, and it all boiled down to “What the heck, just hook the scanner up and see what happens.”
Now, while hardware is half the equation, software is the other half that makes the clock tick. I did have a CD-ROM with software for the scanner but we are talking 1995 here with Mac OS X still only an idea in Steve Jobs’ head. The G4 had System 9 installed and would the software plugin play along with the newer operating system? And with Photoshop 6, too? The answer was “yes” to both questions and while it is somewhat counterproductive to work with System 9 and Photoshop 6 (I have to close the plugin software between each scan to get to the scanned image), I can now digitize the past and use it in different projects.
The quality is still being investigated but it looks promising. Resolution-wise there should be no problem in using these scans for high quality A4 printing, at least.
Is there a downside to all this? Apart from the time invested, yes: Dust and scratches and retouching. The real, analogue world is very present. This is where digital cameras shine. Apart from the odd dust particle on the CCD chip, cleanup is mostly a thing of the past.
Nevertheless, I guess people will queue up at my door now to revitalize their slides and negatives.
Thanks a million to Pål who did not mind parting with the relic – and to Heidi, of course, who tipped me off.