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Comment by keithbingman | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in a photo studio in Germany, we had 2 of these and the predecessor to the Hasselblad/Imacon X1. The difference between them was amazing. I'd still love to have one of those Coolscan 9000s, they are great machines. Even back then (around 2004) we used Vuescan for the Nikons. It was already an issue to get up to date drivers for our Macs.

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It’s not clear from this post which was better, the Nikon or the Hasselblad?

I think the Nikon was 4000 dpi so imagine he means Hasselblad

The X1 was probably better, as it was a [almost] drum scanner.

But scanner tech seems to have basically "hit a wall," in the last decade, or so. Not many advancements in the imaging. I think digicams and pure digital images/documents have made it difficult to justify the cost of developing them.

The Hasselblad. They are considered to be as close to drum scans as scanners can get.

The Flextight is definitely better than the CoolScan, but not approaching drum scan quality. A very good CCD scanner with a great enlarger-quality lens, and the transport is very good at keeping the film flat along the line scanned by the CCD, by the expedient of bending it cylindrically, but it's not the same dynamic range as the photomultipler tube on a drum scanner, or even what the old $50K prepress X-Y flatbed scanners like a Creo Scitex or Fuji Lanovia could do.

Oh I know/agree. It is literally described as a virtual drum scanner by B&H for example though, as inaccurate as that is. To me the main difference is CCD vs. photomultipler.

Sorry, yeah I meant the Hasselblad. The Imacon we had was quite old, but it was an amazing scanner.

I worked in a multimedia lab that had one. Great scanner but god help you if you turned off the automatic dust removal.

VueScan did not support Digital ICE4, which was the only way to scan Kodachromes with automatic dust removal using the infrared channel (Kodachrome is opaque to the infrared LED used on the Coolscan V ED or 5000 ED). Only Nikon Scan did, and possibly SilverFast (Digital ICE was invented by Applied Science Fiction, a subsidiary of Kodak).

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