i got my tax return the other day and decided i better A) buy some film or B) scan some film. since an ebay bid on some astia in 220 came to nought, it was time to go and give the imacon a test drive. at $25 for an hour, even if i managed to get a just a couple decent scans it would be a better result than my 4490 provides and a better deal that sending stuff out to a pro lab.
thankfully my friend in vancouver had used the same imacon before, and he was able to give me some tips that will hopefully prove useful. the toronto image work staff gave me a few tips on how to get a big .tif file at 3200dpi, and i did try making one of those-- a piece of 6x6 came out just shy of 300mb.
but my friend had told me that imacon scanners and hasseblad digital cameras use the same output format, called 3F (.fff). his opinion was that to have the scans output as 'native' imacon files was the way to get the most possible information from each piece of film. the folks at image works kind of chortled at this suggestion when i described it... so i just ignored them and phoned my friend and asked how to do it. after a bit of groping and describing dialogue boxes over the phone, i finally worked it out.
after the first .tif, all the scanned images were .fff files. if you ask your mac for more info on them, it identifies them as adobe photoshop tiff files, and they can be opened in photoshop. they look good except they are quite dark. supposedly this is what a 'real' raw file looks like with no translation or interpolation by the program used to view it. there is a chance that i can open them in lightroom and they will look brighter, etc. otherwise i will be looking into using a DNG convertor or something.
the imacon scanner was super easy to use, and quite quick. i managed to make 13 files in two hours, and thats with at least 20 minutes on the phone trying to sort out the whole 3F thing. the files ranged between 320mb for a piece of 6x6 and 540mb for a piece of 6x9. saved them right to my external. i checked each one quickly with photoshop and they look really, really good. a lot of detail in there, at least equivalent to the 300mb files ive bought from west coast imaging. im really looking forward to seeing what can be done with these files, whether as .fff, .dng, .psd, or .tifs.
heres a sample image-- i tried to get two frames of 645 scanned as a 6x9. it is quite dim and flat, even compared to most other 'raw' scans:
but heres a crop from the frame on the left:
