On Wed, 8 Jan 2003 11:27:50 +0000 Stuart Redler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> Does anyone make contacts of 120 colour neg film using an A3 flatbed > scanner and transparency adapter? > > I'm thinking of getting an adapter for my A3 scanner (Microtek > 9600XL) but I'm wondering if the quality will be as good as real > contacts. Does anyone have any experience of this? I don't want to > buy it only to find the quality is crap. I've just solved this problem for myself, and can now knock out a sheet of contacts from colour/b&w neg in about 90secs from either 6x6 or 35mm, so I'm pretty chuffed. I recently bought a s/h Umax Powerlook II on e-Bay for 78GBP, with tranny hood. This makes excellent contacts using Vuescan, scanning as colour neg and 16bit/ch. They are far better than scanning C41 contacts, or scanning lab-made digital contacts which IME are rubbish. In fact 600ppi is too much to trust to clients, they'd no doubt be tempted to use them for repro. 300ppi is still a bit too high quality, but can be degraded via Jpeg:) Certainly they are good enough to judge sharpness, which is not the case with dig contacts from my local lab. I have cannibalised my Paterson 35mm and 6x6 contact frames, and just use the glass with its plastic mask to get 6 strips of 6@35mm or 4 strips of 3@6x6 into the scanner's 10x8 film-scanning area. The only mod needed was to shim the lid hinge so that the hood could accomodate the 4mm thickness of the glass plate. Motherboard standoffs are about the right (~6mm) length and happen to have the same thread, so it's a 2min job - though longer screws and plastic or metal shim would do the same job. In principle the same sort of thing should work with any similar scanner, like the Agfa Arcus. Scanners which have a tray for film may be more of a problem. I might put together a web page detailing this, if it will be useful. Regards Tony Sleep - http://www.halftone.co.uk =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
