Gordon's Tech

Monday, May 03, 2004

Amazon.com: Camera & Photo: Nikon CoolScan V ED Film Scanner

I have 1500 or so unfiled prints from post-childOne until 'saved by digital'. I'll never get around to filing them.

On the other hand, I could pay someone to run the negatives through this scanner and attach date information to JPEG output. Then dump the results into iPhoto or Photoshop Album for sorting and analysis. I may end up dumping the prints once the negatives are imaged (but keeping the negatives offsite in a well protected environment).

I love the Amazon reviews. This one is extraordinary. Terse but packed with useful information:

Reviewer: Peter Jung from Greater Toronto Area, Canada
Decade's collection of fading film this COOLSCAN can handle. You can obtain detailed images that are truly vivid, sharp, and better than the original then technology.

Batch scanning can be done with one click on the Scan button in Nikon Scan 4's firmware. The maintenance free red, green, blue, and infrared LED light source is gentle to film. The 4000 ppi optical resolution is an ideal start for outputting A3+ prints on the new crop of large format bubblejet and inkjet printers.

Reading the Nikon Scan Reference Manual in the Nikon Scan Reference Manual/Easy Scanning Guide CD would be your best learning tool to get the most out of your scanner. For the most accurate results, the first thing to do before scanning is to set your preferences by clicking on the Prefs button in the Control Area of the Scan Window.

When enabled, the Digital ICE quad Advanced software works well with most film. The Manual will explain that ICE, ROC, GEM, and DEE will not operate with the optional FH-G1 Medical Holder.

ICE will not work on monochrome film unless the film has been developed in colour. ICE will not work properly on Kodachrome, but will work on other brands of slides. Noise may appear if ICE is used on overexposed or very vivid images. ICE will reduce the overall sharpness of the image. ICE is not not designed nor does ICE advertise itself to remove all dust and scratches from film. ICE will reduce most of the dust and scatches, however. You will have to use a third party application like Adobe Photoshop to remove the remaining dust and scratches. ICE alone will double the scanning time of 38 seconds.

ROC may add colour to monochrome or grayscale images. ROC alone will almost double the scanning time.

GEM alone will almost triple the scanning time.

DEE works best when the image is cropped to exclude other unexposed areas of the film. DEE alone will almost quadruple the scanning time.

When enabled, Scan Image Enhancer (SIE) will automatically adjust hue. It does not work with darker images. In fact, the scan produces darker images. You are better off using DEE to pull out hidden detail in the shaded areas.

ICE, ROC, GEM, DEE, and SIE together will almost quintuple the scanning time.

Unsharp Mask can be created to all colours, or individually to red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow colours in the image. Deselect blue if you do not want to emphasize the grain in an image with blue sky.

The SA-21 strip-film adaptor only works for 2 - 6 frames. To save money by not having to buy the optional 1 - 6 frame FH-3 film holder, place a 1 frame negative into an empty cardboard slide holder and insert into the MA-21 slide holder. Remember to select Neg (color), and Calibrated RGB in the Control Area before scanning.

Along with a short USB 2.0 cable, included in the package is a Nikon View 6 CD, which is an application, used to organize saved pictures in TIFF and JPEG file formats only. According to the Manual, large files created in Nikon Scan may not show on Nikon View slide shows.

Before clicking on the Scan button, press Ctrl (MS Windows) and the Autofocus button. Then left click on a focal point in the preview image to ensure accurate focusing at that point. You can always change the focus point using the same method, or by using the Focus Tool in the Layout Tools palette. The palette can also be customized to suit.

If you have to use the Analog Gain palette to correct or adjust the colour values for each of the elements in the scanner's light source, your LED's may require repair. The probability of repair to the LED's is not specifically discussed in the Manual.

If desktop or cubbyhole space is an issue, the scanner can be placed with either the top or side vents facing up. Remember to provide the minimum clearances to the scanner for ventilation. The dual wrap around band of rubber feet will ensure a cushioned slip resistant footing.

After using the transparency unit on an Epson Perfection 1670 Photo flatbed scanner for 2 months, this COOLSCAN is the only economical equipment to use to obtain satisfying scans. It is amazing how much the original analogue images have improved.

If you have at minimum several hundred frames to archive, and the time to spend in front of your monitor performing adjustments and scans to each frame, then you will not regret overspending on this scanner.

Sunday, May 02, 2004

Banks for children, finding things, and market failure!

MAGNIF Product Listing

This site specializes in coin banks. It was hard to find. I located it by:

1. seeing a coin bank advertised in a catalog
2. taking strings from the marketing description and feeding them into google (every catalog uses the same vendor-provided description).
3. locating sites selling the "reference" item then finding this site.

A similar technique is used for researching products that lack distinctive names. Search on both the non-distinct name and the distinctive name of a competitor's product ....

It's interesting though that I had trouble finding this. I'm better at finding things than most people ....

Update: The colorful $8 coin sorting banks lasted about 45 minutes. One sorted fairly accurately, another less accurately. Soon coins jammed, requiring disassembly. On disassembly the plastic pins fell out. The device was finished. We paid about $10 for under an hour of minor amusement and we generated more landfill.

This is what, in my main blog (Faughnan's Notes), I classify as yet another instance of market failure. We wanted the device I suspect this toy was based on -- a toy that worked quite well about 20 years ago. Maybe 100 years ago. We'd have paid $20 for one that worked. What we got was dreck -- for $7 plus shipping. Labeled "made in America" by the way -- I rather doubt that.

Life for the middle class American in the early 21st century is an unrelenting and extremely annoying series of bigger and smaller "market failures". I think this might be a truly new phenomenen with a significant real and opportunity cost.

Not to mention overflowing landfills.

Gmail - Inbox -- first spam is eBay account phishing!

Gmail - Inbox

I got my first spam on my beta gmail account. The address has never bene published, so this was a dictionairy attack. It was a "phishing" spam for a fraudulent eBay account. GMail put it into my spam box, from which there's a convenient "delete forever" option.

Soon the deluge will begin. I'm curious to see how GMail will handle this.

We know how to fix spam, now we're waiting for things to get bad enough to enable the fixes. Unfortunately I think the overkilll (Microsoft/Intel's Passport/DRM/"trusted computing") solutions will be the winners.

iPhoto Not enough disk space bug - it's still there. A deeper problem with the OS X cache and file system?

Apple - Discussions - Not enough disk space bug -- it's back!!

An old bug is still there -- but now I don't think it's truly an iPhoto bug (the iPhoto glitch is the meaningless error message). See my other blog postings on this topic!

The "not enough disk space" iPhoto bug has cursed many of us over the years. This is the misleading error message iPhoto produces when something goes wrong during image exporting to the file system or to a client application (Quicktime moviews, etc). (Usually there are GBs free and the export size is a few hundred MB.)

It just means "Something has gone wrong, I don't know what".

iPhoto 4.01 was thought to have fixed this problem, but it just recurred in a new iPhoto 4.01 album of mine that contains only a few hundred images.

There are several workarounds that are thought to help [1].

In the past I've used the approach of dividing up the image set into smaller and smaller exports, until I find the one image (it's always been one image) that causes the problem. I then crop it and undo the crop and the problem resolves.

This time I tried the approach of deleting the "thumb" files in the iPhoto Library (see [1]). It didn't work.

Based on the theory that the most common cause is corruption in an iPhoto cache, I tried out the $10 Panther Cache Cleaner's "deep clean" option and rebooted. The problem resolved.

In the past I've blamed iPhoto for this problem. Now I suspect it's a deeper problem with OS X that just shows up more often in iPhoto because of its heavy use of the OS X caching subsystem. Power user forums, such as OS X Hints, now consider cleaning the cache subsystem to be the modern equivalent of rebuilding the Classic desktop -- the first solution to most problems (even before repairing privileges, which in 10.3.3 seems to rarely make a difference).

A cache subsystem problem may represent trouble in the cache code itself or in the underlying OS. There are lots of nasty interacting layers down there, where BSD Unix meets OS X. I wonder if tracking down those nasty problems is part of the task assigned the file system gurus that came to Apple from BeOS.

This is an annoying problem from iPhoto, but in my experience either tracking down the bad image or using deep cache cleaner will fix it for a while. It may, however, be a bigger problem for the OS.

[1] http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?128@6.XeoZaJQWlc5.8@.688eb0a2
lists many of the theoretical solutions.

Review: Edmund Scientific Astroscan telescope (DansData)

Review: Edmund Scientific Astroscan telescope

Dan does a wonderful review of this scope. They key concepts are portability and wide-field viewing -- nebulae rather than planets. There's much to marvel at in the universe at very large scales; match your interests to the accessible!

I'm seriously tempted to buy one. I'm also happy to learn that Edmund is still around, it's been 25 years since I admired their catalogs.

An older but interesting digicam review

Review: Canon EOS D60 digital camera

An older but typically Dan-like review, with many asides of interest.