Anybody own this filmscanner?

Hi,
This deal looks interesting, and not a bad price:

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/740...o=electronics#

Anybody seen one in real life? I've Googled all over trying to find it
somewhere else, mayhap with some reviews but no luck.
Thanks!
Rich

On Jul 11, 10:08 pm, wrote:
Hi,
This deal looks interesting, and not a bad price:

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/740...o=electronics#

Anybody seen one in real life? I've Googled all over trying to find it
somewhere else, mayhap with some reviews but no luck.
Thanks!
Rich

Looks to be about the quality of that turntable with a USB output,
i.e. it's certainly nowhere near a pro product or even close. It might
WORK but I would have serious doubts about the Dmax (dynamic range),
neutrality of the light source, and the accuracy of the overall image
color balance.

Real film scanners cost money but IMO are well worth it if you have a
fair amount of slides and/or negatives and want to get some decent
digital image files from them.

Karl Winkler
http://www.karlwinkler.com
http://www.giovanniquartet.com

In article .com,
wrote:

Hi,
This deal looks interesting, and not a bad price:

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/740...o=electronics#

Anybody seen one in real life? I've Googled all over trying to find it
somewhere else, mayhap with some reviews but no luck.
Thanks!
Rich

Well, it's 1829 dpi, and that's one of the numbers they're bragging
about. If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct, that's about
4.3MP in the total image (keeping in mind the usual caveats about sensor
pixels and color interpolation; one sensor pixel does not one "real"
color pixel make). Whether that's good enough for you depends a lot on
what you're scanning and what you want to do with the images.

I don't know much about LED light sources, except that it seems like the
quality of the white LEDs that they use could have a pretty large effect
on the color gamut. I know that some of the Nikon and Minolta scanners
use R,G,B LEDs (separate ones) to overcome some of the issues with white
LEDs (at the time they were manufactured), but I don't really know how
much of an effect that has. Scanner light sources seems to be a topic of
much debate, you can read more about it if you want. [1]

Personally I'd never want to buy a film scanner without knowing the
DMax, and after buying a scanner that has mediocre DMax and being a
little disappointed with it, I'd strongly recommend buying "as much DMax
as you can afford," if you take contrasty photos or want to do a lot of
negative scanning. (Slides have less dynamic range in them than film,
and thus are a little easier to scan.)

But if you just want to scan in a few slides for a project or something,
I guess the $99 price is tough to beat. I wouldn't view it as an
archival tool, though.

Just my $.02.

-Kadin.


[1] One thread that turned up and seemed to have some information in it
about types of LED sources:
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00EiGI

In article .com,
wrote:

Hi,
This deal looks interesting, and not a bad price:

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/740...o=electronics#

Looks like a 5 megapixel fixed focus camera to me. Clever, actually.
Except for the "PC only" part; that's just dumb engineering.

Isaac

On Jul 12, 10:19 pm, Kadin2048 wrote:
In article .com,

wrote:
Hi,
This deal looks interesting, and not a bad price:

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/740...o=electronics#

Anybody seen one in real life? I've Googled all over trying to find it
somewhere else, mayhap with some reviews but no luck.
Thanks!
Rich

Well, it's 1829 dpi, and that's one of the numbers they're bragging
about. If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct, that's about
4.3MP in the total image (keeping in mind the usual caveats about sensor
pixels and color interpolation; one sensor pixel does not one "real"
color pixel make). Whether that's good enough for you depends a lot on
what you're scanning and what you want to do with the images.

I don't know much about LED light sources, except that it seems like the
quality of the white LEDs that they use could have a pretty large effect
on the color gamut. I know that some of the Nikon and Minolta scanners
use R,G,B LEDs (separate ones) to overcome some of the issues with white
LEDs (at the time they were manufactured), but I don't really know how
much of an effect that has. Scanner light sources seems to be a topic of
much debate, you can read more about it if you want. [1]

Personally I'd never want to buy a film scanner without knowing the
DMax, and after buying a scanner that has mediocre DMax and being a
little disappointed with it, I'd strongly recommend buying "as much DMax
as you can afford," if you take contrasty photos or want to do a lot of
negative scanning. (Slides have less dynamic range in them than film,
and thus are a little easier to scan.)

But if you just want to scan in a few slides for a project or something,
I guess the $99 price is tough to beat. I wouldn't view it as an
archival tool, though.

Just my $.02.

-Kadin.

[1] One thread that turned up and seemed to have some information in it
about types of LED sources:
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00EiGI

Thanks Kadin and Karl. I appreciate the input and think I'll keep
looking. I think a service would be a better fit for my needs.

Rich