Auteur: Philippe Cas
Date: 14-09-2007 12:04
Commentaire sur les imacons trouvé dans un FLAAR report (ça vaut ce que ça vaut ...)
What about the Imacon scanners?
The Imacon is a scanner that I liked when I first saw it, in part the sole sample I did with an Imacon scanner looked okay to me. In addition the people at the company were pleasant when I visited their headquarters in Denmark years ago. Yet for two years in a row, Seybold Reports, the most prestigious professional test of highend
scanners has given one of their lower ratings to the Imacon. I quote:
“Imacon FlexTight Precision II lacks color depth, although its highlight and shadow rendering got fair marks. For applications such as newspaper production, these low results are not as important as they might be for other applications. For applications
such as fine art printing, it the image quality reproduced here is representative of the scanners general performance, these scanners are unlikely to be suitable.”
We recently got an independent detailed review of Imacon which explained some of the reasons why their basic “roll in curved” system may be inappropriate and may lead to misalignment and the image being out of focus. It is possible that you may not experience these problems and you should go ahead and buy whatever scanner you personally prefer, It is worth adding, however, that we feel that advertising any CCD scanner as a drum scanner, or even insinuating this comparison as in some Imacon
ads, is potentially misleading to people who are new to scanning.
Only a true drum scanner with a PMT system offers the actual benefits of a drum scanner. You do not get these benefits with any pseudo drum, indeed you may possibly get defects. Besides, my experience with the Scitex flatbed shows that the Scitex EverSmart flatbed scanner can definitely handle fine art quality, indeed many of the
larger fine art giclee companies use CreoScitex equipment in their own facilities.
The other problem with most models of Imacon scanners is that you can scan only one image at a time. Kind of rough if you have 50,000 slides (as does the FLAAR Photo Archive). Something that two people have now reported is the propensity of some Imacon scanners to gobble up their slides. You stick it in, and it somehow gets
stuck. Whether this is operator error or a bad design is immaterial.
We spoke with a licensed reseller of Imacon scanners. He said he stopped selling them because of various problems. The one I remember is the “it gobbled up and/or twisted my slide” in the feeder mishap.
Yes, thousands of people probably love their Imacon scanner, but we can only report what we hear and read about it. We have visited the Imacon booth at Photokina (excellent Thai food) and are considering re-evaluating the Imacon if we can find the time and resources.
A few years ago (last day of October 2002) we interviewed a community college professor who had evidently updated their early Imacon scanner (which evidently was not without flaws) to a newer model. It is my impression that they like the new Imacon scanner better than the earlier model. Thus in fairness to Imacon it is probably true
that their newer models are indeed improved over earlier models. We do not have an Imacon ourselves, not in either of our facilities (we have several Umax and Heidelberg scanners which work just fine).
Here are his comments he sent Nov 3rd after the visit,
Nicholas,
It was good to see you. I hope the show was valuable for you. Thank you for the kind words about the images.We are using the Imacon 848, and the older Flextight II. The 848 is at least 5 times faster than the older model and will take images up to 5 x 7. We restrict usage to medium format and larger because of the occasional problems
with small film, and because we have several Nikon CoolScan 4000s that can produce the limit of resolution with 35mm. The earlier film holders for 4 x 5 did not grip the film tightly enough, and these would sometimes get jammed in the machine. In that situation, as the machine was thumping while trying to eject the film, there was no way to
turn off the power short of pulling the plug! Very disconcerting. The newest machine has had only two crashes, and those were due to user error: the 848 has a hinged drop down deck/light table for placing the filmholder.
We had a student close the table before starting the scan…. The 848 has worked flawlessly aside from that one problem.
I have not done any side by side comparisons with the CREO, time for testing has to come behind time for teaching and managing. As far as curlon the Imacon, we have not noticed any aberrations with larger format film. We have noticed, however, that vibration to the table during the scan is inadvisable--I suppose this should be self-evident.
The algorithms from in the Imacon software for scanning color negatives have improved immensely since the first versions. I cannot remember the version of the latest software, but in the earliest versions I had even resorted to scanning the negatives as positive and then inverting the tones--a desparate attempt to get a good scan that was not very successful. Thankfully, that is now repaired.
Cordialement
Philippe Cas
philippe(at)usine-a-photo.com
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