[MacDV] Re: Film Scanners (slide feeders)

[Danny Grizzle]

On 12/31/02 12:02 PM, "Randy Wilson" <WilsonR at fonix.com> wrote:

> We agreed that one of the main solutions is going
> to involve a 2-dimensional CCD.  Otherwise, the higher the resolution,
> the more scans per inch have to be done, and thus the slower things will
> be.  With a good high resolution 2-D CCD, it should be possible to do
> one scan (or perhaps 3 if separate snapshots are taken for red, green
> and blue) instead of having to do over 5000 individual scan lines
> separately.  That could speed the scanning part up by over 1000 times,
> potentially (i.e., instead of 14 minutes for a full-blown super-sampled
> scan, it could be done in .84 seconds).  Couple that with a slide feeder
> as good as the 1957 model, and you could scan seriously fast.

This is something to think about. The latest digital scanners now have image
sensors that are 100% the size of a 35mm negative. They also have
resolutions of, I think, about 14 megapixels (see new Kodak pro digital
camera announced at most recent Photokina for details).

Wouldn't it be interesting to see someone develop a digital "contact
printer", where film emulsion was physically flattened against such a high
resolution sensor?

I can see where this would solve one problem, but create another. In
conventional motion picture contact printing, each source image is mated
with a fresh clean frame of the contact print. It would seem to me that
cleaning the receptor CCD -- already a major consideration with
interchangeable lens digital cameras, would be an issue.

Side note about Nikon film scanners: sometimes when I inspect slide scans at
very high resolution, I detect misalignments. Occasionally, one row of
pixels is shifted out of place. Maybe this is my device, but it happens more
than you might expect.

Danny Grizzle