![]() The issue here is not whether you can access an old photograph for secondary or casual use, it's whether serious photographers, who really cared about making good photographs, will have a way to make full use of the quality of those film photographs in the digital realm?īy and large, flatbed scanners don't take up the slack. As in, you're not going to be able to! You'll need legacy hardware and software for that. Why should they care? You're going to have some very interesting problems if you try to run your old scanner under Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.7 (Lion). No companies write updated drivers for these old scanners. If you get a new computer, you'll likely be in trouble. If your scanner breaks, you will likely be in trouble. Realistically, getting really good medium format film scans means either spending substantial sums of money with one of the few labs out there that still does scanning, or finding a used medium format scanner, which are in sufficient demand that they now go for about 50% more than they did originally. There is still a high-quality medium format film scanner made: it's from Hasselblad. The other major photographic manufacturers never did. Minolta is no more and Nikon no longer makes medium format film scanners. Yet, it has already become just about impossible to do medium format film scans without throwing a great deal of money at the problem or scrounging around for old hardware. It's a legacy problem that the making of new photographs doesn't eliminate. The majority of important photographs in the world (either to the collective consciousness or the individual photographer) are on film, and the majority of serious photographers' stock is film photographs. ![]() That's not a long time, compared to how long most photographers have been photographing. It's about a dozen years old for medium and large format film, and less than a decade old for 35mm film. The wholesale switchover from film photography is a recent phenomenon. This situation is one that I honestly did not expect anywhere near this soon. So far, it's working fine.īut what happens when something goes wrong that I can't hack my way around? It is becoming more and more difficult to economically or conveniently get high-quality film scans. More online research found me a SCSI-FireWire converter/adapter. Well, I no longer have any SCSI-interfaced computers. I switched the scanner to SCSI I/O and it booted up just fine. After some research I ran across a posting that pointed to a failure in the FireWire interface as the source of the problem. My scanner had started behaving erratically and then wouldn't boot up at all. It is all too possible that there really is no one repairing the scanners any longer, anywhere (if that's not true, please e-mail me: the meantime, I was able to circumvent the problem. This is the first time in my experience that the hydra that is the TOP Readership, with its astonishing collective store of knowledge, was incapable of solving a photographic problem. I came up with no one-neither Precision Cameras nor Mack Cameras, the only two suggestions I got, work on this model, because they don't have a supply of parts for it. I put out a call to any readers who knew of someone who still serviced this scanner. Two weeks back, I mentioned that my Minolta DiMAGE Multi Pro AF-5000 scanner had died and was in need of electronics servicing. If you're either entirely traditional or entirely digital, from camera to print, you can skip this-it's irrelevant to you. This particular column is for said hybrid printers. Darkroom printing is great! You just happen to be a minority (much as black-and-white photography is a minority of all photography) the majority of serious photographic printers out there see hybrid as the better way to go. To those of you who still like darkroom printing of film, I think that's fine! I'm not dissing what you do, heaven knows, so please don't get defensive. I like my digital prints from film much better than my darkroom prints (dye transfer notwithstanding).
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