I am Marc Schlossman, freelance photographer based in London. I do corporate, documentary, and submit to various libraries. I have two studio/business partners and we manage digital photographic services for a small but growing clientele and we put on exhibitions in the studio/gallery space while maintaining a website that coordinates all of the above. So: out of the lurk and into the light... a somewhat late response to the Imacon/recommend thread.
I have not yet personally made the jump to digital photography but we have the Imacon 848 and before that I owned the Photo and the P2. I agree with David Townend: definitely make sure the service backup is in place when you buy. The Studio Workshop have been great over the years. But twice I have had machines sent back to Denmark for repair, kept for two to three months and were then returned. In one instance, with the same problem still happening. And we never receive an explanation. We had a loaner during those times but the experiences did not inspire confidence.
The problem is the appearance of thin bands of what look like smeared grain (looking like motion blur), visible at 100 percent, very narrow, the banding running from side to side (perpendicular to the direction of travel through the machine). The bands are most prominent in black+white film scans where the grain is more defined but are also visible in colour work. The position of the bands on the scan is random and there can be anywhere from one to several on any given scan. Re-scanning immediately produces bands but in different parts of the frame.
Has anyone else had this problem? Having owned three separate models and used several individual scanners at each grade, I have *never* owned an Imacon scanner that did not eventually have this problem. The 848 we have now was great for about a year but the banding is gradually starting to occur and it gets worse with time. We have tried various system/cable combinations and it is not a data transfer issue.
No one will confirm this at TSW or Imacon (back when you could call Denmark direct and talk to someone about tech support) but my best guess now is that the motor does not take the film through the machine at a constant rate and perhaps jumps a bit creating the blurred lines. Or that as the film is curved into the machine, the magnetic cover on the film holder shears/slips over the top of the steel as the apparatus is curved, thus causing the film to move slightly in the holder.
Apologies for the length of this first post but this problem has been a serious monkey on our collective back. Please tell me I am not seeing things...
Regards,
Marc
http://www.marcschlossman.com
FrameZero Digital 45 Mitchell Street London EC1V 3QZ England
http://www.framezero.net
T +44.20.7251.4547
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