Scanners, please tell us about your scanner

[Yoc]

That was my suggestion but Narf's is even more simple.

[robbbyg]

What about inking the plates and pressing them on a piece of paper like they were made for ?

tried that, doesnt work, apparently the pressure needed for a good print is extreme, i only get messy fingers and a very vague picture out of it,

Camera will be the best ive got a half decent kodak that ive photod with b4, scanning the plates difficult, they are completely flat sharp edges scratch glass too easily, i broke first scanner just by letting go of the plate while i was putting it into position,

re; other query, i have posted pics of plates in other post

Cheers Rob

[John C]

Going in a different direction, if you don't care what they look like (though I do) but want to retain and preserve the structure, I've heard good things about what they call "milk-scanning."  I don't know where you'd get a liquid that's not damaging to the plate and a good contrasting color, but the idea is that you put the object in a tub and take repeated pictures from a camera above, with software looking for the border between the liquid and the object.  You get a stack of outlines that then get turned into a 3D model.

Here's the original approach:

http://milkscanner.moviesandbox.net/

(If you instead want to spend a few million bucks to do the same thing, they scan important archaeological finds with a laser, doing pretty much the same thing.  There's a guy with a recent TED talk who is currently sent by the UN to do major sites in any kind of danger of loss.)

It'd have to be tweaked to be able to manage one surface, but could be very interesting in terms of a DIYer taking the model and producing his own plate with a CNC router or 3D printer.

Of course, it might also be too much work and not interesting enough to work through the details, too, especially when the majority of us probably would just rather look at the plate.

[JVJ (RIP)]

Thinking outside of the box, Rob,
Most scanners will probably work upside down, so why not put the scanner on the plate, rather than the plate on the scanner?

Might work and would be better quality than you're going to get with a Kodak. You would need a digital camera with LOTS of MegaPixels to get the resolution and quality needed.

Peace, Jim (|:{>

[Yoc]

Wow, some great ideas being mentioned here.  Nice work guys!

[narfstar]

Jim you may have given the answer

[srca1941]

What about just inking the plate and making a print?

-Eric

[Yoc]

Discussed and it didn't work Eric.  The pressure needed is too high.

[srca1941]

I can see that if you are pressing the plate down onto the paper, but what about if the paper is on top of the plate and pressed down? I'd think that would work.

-Eric

[narfstar]

Isn't their a comic book museum? Perhaps they would pay for shipping to have the plates on display. They may have the resources to print them.

[rangerhouse]

Minolta PS5000C USB I/F Color Book / Publication Scanner w/ Book Craddle
waiting on shipment & will test as soon as it arrives

[vaillant]

My scanner is an Epson Perfection 1650. I Have an Epson Perfection V700 at work, but as long as we are scanning paper sources, there are no big differences. For the italian comics' publications of the 1930s and 1940s I scanned I used our huge Canon color copier, but although the quality is good, it reaches a 600ppi resolution at its best.

I'll just weigh in here shortly in support of the natural look.  Even when they were brand new, these comics pages weren't pure white, and the paper exhibited a pulpy texture.  As a scanner, I feel like I should represent the physical object I'm scanning and not some ideal.  That's not to say I don't do some corrections and that there's not subjective judgments that come into play here but only to say that I'm looking to make a comic look like it did fresh of the newsstand or at least as close as I can get it without distorting the colors too much.  Sure artists may not have been pleased that their work was being reproduced on pulp paper with rough printing methods, but I also believe they probably took some of this into account when producing the original work.  The new re-colorings I see of a lot of golden age comics are truly atrocious. The flat colors and perfectly solid inks in my opinion take something very vital away from the experience.  When you lose all the texture from the pulp paper as well as from the layered printing, the old comics just don't look right.  Similarly, I doubt much of the modern digital, gradient-heavy coloring methods would reproduce well on the old paper...

@darwination: PRECISELY my point. I agree 200%.

Call me crazy, but if a page of text is scanned from a pulp I want it to look like it was scanned from a pulp.  If a page of text is scanned from a paperback I want it to look like it came from a paperback.  If it was scanned from a slick page, I want it to look like it came from a slick.

Oh, surely I won’t call you "crazy", since I developed this insight in 20+ years of being an autodidact in typography, graphic design and type design. You have no idea on how much I have reflected upon the issue.

All that said, I do understand tastes vary

Yes, but nonetheless they are subject to a criteria. Which may not be intelligible but has objective elements which can be discussed.

I don't care for scanning speed, cause I process only one book per day.
It's a labor of love. Most of the time I spend trying to get a STRAIGHT scan out of those crooked, slantwise printed books.

@tilliban: Oh, how I understand you. And think of this: italian comics' publications are even worse, and they are tabloid size or more. Ugh.

[permpoom]

I have an Epson 10000XL Photo Scanner. Everything I scan is at 1200dpi 24 bit. When you blow the file up in Photoshop, you can see the fibers in the paper and the dot screens are perfectly captured. This helps a lot to avoid moire on resizes. The 24 bit gives a great deal of leeway in color correction. I haven't done a lot of comic books yet... mostly illustration, comic strips, animation and caricature going back over 100 years. I've got about 8 TB of scans so far.

If anything has any comic books or comic strips that they need really good scans of, I'm happy to let you use my scanner if you're in the Los Angeles area and will allow me to add copies of your scans to my collection. It can take a while to scan though. A full pass across the bed takes about 18 minutes. I have a crew of volunteers helping me.

[vaillant]

Hi permpoom, welcome.
May I ask you: where do you store the files? As long as they do not exceed 2-4TB one can keep them on an internal HD, but since I like to scan high resolution too, I was wondering if you also keep copies on DVD or the like.
Which model is the 10000XL? Is that for photography and transpariencies? Flatbed?

[permpoom]

The Epson 10000XL is one of the best 11x17 flatbed photo scanners around. It does 2400dpi (hardware) and 48 bit color. It's a real workhorse.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/Product.do?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&sku=E10000XL-PH

I have about 50 TB of data on 8  four drive Drobos. All of the drives back up the others, so if a drive fails, you just pop a new one in and the Drobo recreates the missing drive. I've only had one drive failure (knock on wood) so far, and the Drobo fixed it perfectly. It took a long time (two days) to recreate the missing drive though.

Drobos aren't as fast as regular hard drives, but they're a lot safer. I swear by them.

http://www.drobo.com/