I worked for Corbis back in the days when they were first setting up their labs, and while I wasn't directly involved with the lab work or the image taxonomy, a good friend of mine was the guy who designed their initial scanning labs. The room was a restricted room, ventilated with prefiltered air and kept at positive pressure (like the silicon fab labs are). They used drum scanners, and tons of 'air' (compressed helium if I recollect correctly).
Even so, there was a long arguement as to what resolutions were 'useful', and they initially chose - primarily for cost/performance reasons, to scan at 2kx3k for 35mm format, and to scan larger formats at 2kxXk where X was the appropriate fractional multiplier. Reasoning was that for the majority of image reuse, 2k would let them be at magazine quality. They likely are scanning at larger bit depth now that storage costs have come down, but the goal always was price/performance - with the idea that for something really critical - say a billboard in Grand Central Sta NY, they would bill at a rate that covered the rescan. So while on one hand, the big guys CAN scan better - you can do almost as good at home. EXCEPT that for important shoots, the final scan IS done at higher quality. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Yarvin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:35 PM Subject: [filmscanners] Re: Digital for magazine publication? > Very simply, if digital really was the problem these art directors > claimed, whose buying all those royalty free photo CDs for hundreds of > dollars each? How is Photodisk and the like remaining in business? > Some of those disks make for some pretty expensive computer monitor > wallpaper, and they'd also be pretty boring to look at. Art and Fellow Listreaders: The big RF companies use drum scans and offer tech support. I think the problem is that the mistrust isn't for the concept of digital, it's for the idea that us little guys can even come remotely close to the quality the big companies offer. See if you can beg or borrow a disc or two from PhotoDisc, Corbis, Brand X or DigitalVision (to name the biggest players) and compare the scan quality to what our home scanners can offer. Sometimes we measure up, and sometimes we don't. Brian Yarvin Stock Photography from Edison, NJ http://www.brianyarvin.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body