I've owned this scanner since earlier this year, having no scanner and no
patience to wait for the new high priced Nikons. For those interested, here
are some further comments about it.
If you are thinking of scanning mounted slides, it works well out of the
box, and the rest of this is immaterial to you. However, the film transport
and focusing mechanisms have design and manufacturing problems. The latest
software has numerous annoyances. Together these will make life difficult
for film scanning folks, to say the least.
99% of my images are on negatives and unmounted slides in strips. So this
capability is very important aspect of a film scanner for me. In fact, the
RFS 3600's ability to scan a whole 36 film strip appealed to me from a time
saving perspective.
The product turns out to be a real dichotomy, in that it performs best on
mounted slides, yet offers no slide feeder capabilities at all. With that,
it's primary appeal would be to people scanning film strips, especially with
the desire to do a whole roll at once (a unique feature in the market
currently). Face it, scanning film, especially at higher resolutions, such
as the 3600 dpi the RFS3600 offers take a lot of time. The more automated
the process, the less invasive it is to your life. God knows we all spend
too much in front of Photoshop as it is, why add more the basically
mechanical process of converting analog images into digital form with a
fixed recipe.
My plan was to get all film back from the lab uncut, feed it into the RFS
3600, do some initial adjustments on the first frame, and then tell it to
scan every frame to disk with the same settings, returning 1 or 2 hours
later to do any editing. That was the plan, the reality follows:
In the RFS3600, the focusing is performed using a plastic frame holder that
is pushed down on each corner in up to 20 steps (film strips) or 40 steps
(mounted slides). The differences in focusing steps between mounted film
and unmounted film will be obvious in a moment.
Focus setting "1" (of 1 to 20) is perfectly aligned vertically with the film
transport guides and transport rollers on either side of the focusing frame.
The transport's internal film guides run outside the image area, along the
sprocket borders, with the pinch roller running on the film sprockets
themselves. All well and good, so far. However, there has been velvet
installed on the top and bottom portion of the transport over the film's
image area. The felt is so thick that is rubs on both the emulsion and
non-emulsion side of the film both on the intake and outtake sides of the
transport. The inbound and outbound pinch rollers are connected in tandem
rotation by a toothed-belt driven by one stepper motor. This means the
right and left sides of the film always move in the same direction.
When the RFS 3600 focuses, it moves just the center frame downward using the
central frame holder. The central frame holder rides on pins, while the
whole thing suspended with some rather fine springs. My unit only had 2
pins at diagonal corners, yet there were mounts and holes for 4 pins, one at
each corner. As the film is pushed downward to focus it, tension is created
by the fact that the pinch rollers on the left and right side of the unit
each have a fairly good grasp on the film. As the focus approaches the 20
mark (around 15 or greater), the film strip is actually under so much
tension that the frame image will buckle in the middle, completely changing
the image's distance from the lens.
Now imagine this, when scanning the first or last frames of the roll, the
tension only comes from one side. In this case the films goes through
different gyrations during focusing, partially due to the pair of missing
vertical guide pins, and some missing screws holding the center frame holder
together. For the first frame, with the tension on the left only, the right
side of the frame would be pushed down further than the left side, causing
nothing but a narrow portion in the middle to be focused. The more the
focus value approached its limit of 20, the more tilted the image became.
[ this is longer than I had planned, so I'll cut to the chase ]
After repeated scans of the same image, the heat from the lamp under the
film causes it buckle slightly, changing focus over time.
When scanning long strips, 36 images is the software's limit (37 doesn't
work), and often on Win98 (occasionally on Win2k), the scanner software
would crash after frame 16 or 17.
The velvet used collects dust quickly, and will add dust and scratches to
clean film strips. Removing the felt causes the unit to malfunction and not
recognize film, as the light sensors think the plastic is film, and tries
forever to eject a non-existent film strip upon first power up.
Forgoing the warranty (instead thinking class action lawsuit), I endeavored
to see if an otherwise fabulous lens and scanner element could be made to
work better.
I found 2 M3x25 roller pins, ground them down slightly the same height as
the other two, and put them in the unit. The bound the center image frame,
so I driller the holes larger where needed so the binding was gone. I added
the 2 missing tiny screws holding the back edge of the center image frame so
it wouldn't split under film tension. I removed all the velvet, and above
each of the 3 sensors I drilled 1/4" holes so I could small squares of
velvet above them without touching the film.
I also played with the image sizing and focusing (complicated to explain
here, but requires a caliper to get the focus properly set). I moved the
proper focus range as close to the "1" setting as possible. "4" turned out
to be achievable. This reduced the tension on the film considerably, and
finally consistent focusing was achieved, though the first, middle, and last
frames all had different ideal focus points, but consistent from film type
to film type, which is better.
To anyone who has gotten this far, you probably realize that the RFS 3600 is
a disaster, and should be pulled from the market and considerably
reengineered before allowed to be sold again.
I should add that I've had 2 different 1 hour phone calls with Kodak about
the film strip focusing problem, and each time that claim no one else had
problems with focusing using the newest software (which I have), and they
quickly dismissed my suggestions that it has a design or manufacturing
problem.
Cheers,
Gerald
-Your neighborhood tech reporter on the beat. :)
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